China’s five-month suspension in US-Chinese military contacts to protest Washington’s arms sales to Taiwan has ended with the visit this week of a US Defense Department official, a top Chinese officer said yesterday.
China put such exchanges on hold in October over a US$6.5 billion US arms sale to self-governing Taiwan, including such advanced weaponry as Patriot missiles and Apache attack helicopters. China, which regards Taiwan as a renegade province, said the sale interfered with internal Chinese affairs and harmed its national security.
In retaliation, Beijing canceled a US visit by a senior Chinese general, other similar visits and port calls by naval vessels. It also indefinitely postponed meetings on humanitarian assistance, disaster relief and stopping the spread of weapons of mass destruction.
Writing in the official English-language China Daily newspaper, Rear Admiral Yang Yi (楊毅) said formal contacts would resume with the exchanges yesterday and today between top Chinese officers and David Sedney, US deputy assistant secretary of defense for East Asian security affairs.
However, Yang said Beijing would continue to protest arms sales to Taiwan and rejected US criticisms over a lack of transparency in China’s military buildup.
“China will not tolerate any infringement into its core national interests and will make no concession on this principal issue,” Yang wrote.
“China’s reasonable military development and military transparency has long been an outstanding issue in Sino-US bilateral relations,” he said.
Yang also contended that improved relations between Taiwan and China over recent months have “deprived the US of any excuses for continued arms sales to the island.”
The US embassy said the talks were closed to the media, but a briefing would be held today. Meetings began early yesterday and were due to wind up either later in the day or this morning, the embassy said.
Nearly 20 years of annual double-digit percentage increases in China’s defense budget have raised concerns from the US and China’s neighbors, although Beijing says any worries are unfounded.
That figure will be closely scrutinized when the national legislature opens for its annual session next month, amid from falling exports and declining tax revenues.
THE ‘MONSTER’: The Philippines on Saturday sent a vessel to confront a 12,000-tonne Chinese ship that had entered its exclusive economic zone The Philippines yesterday said it deployed a coast guard ship to challenge Chinese patrol boats attempting to “alter the existing status quo” of the disputed South China Sea. Philippine Coast Guard spokesman Commodore Jay Tarriela said Chinese patrol ships had this year come as close as 60 nautical miles (111km) west of the main Philippine island of Luzon. “Their goal is to normalize such deployments, and if these actions go unnoticed and unchallenged, it will enable them to alter the existing status quo,” he said in a statement. He later told reporters that Manila had deployed a coast guard ship to the area
A group of Uyghur men who were detained in Thailand more than one decade ago said that the Thai government is preparing to deport them to China, alarming activists and family members who say the men are at risk of abuse and torture if they are sent back. Forty-three Uyghur men held in Bangkok made a public appeal to halt what they called an imminent threat of deportation. “We could be imprisoned and we might even lose our lives,” the letter said. “We urgently appeal to all international organizations and countries concerned with human rights to intervene immediately to save us from
RISING TENSIONS: The nations’ three leaders discussed China’s ‘dangerous and unlawful behavior in the South China Sea,’ and agreed on the importance of continued coordination Japan, the Philippines and the US vowed to further deepen cooperation under a trilateral arrangement in the face of rising tensions in Asia’s waters, the three nations said following a call among their leaders. Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr and outgoing US President Joe Biden met via videoconference on Monday morning. Marcos’ communications office said the leaders “agreed to enhance and deepen economic, maritime and technology cooperation.” The call followed a first-of-its-kind summit meeting of Marcos, Biden and then-Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida in Washington in April last year that led to a vow to uphold international
US president-elect Donald Trump is not typically known for his calm or reserve, but in a craftsman’s workshop in rural China he sits in divine contemplation. Cross-legged with his eyes half-closed in a pose evoking the Buddha, this porcelain version of the divisive US leader-in-waiting is the work of designer and sculptor Hong Jinshi (洪金世). The Zen-like figures — which Hong sells for between 999 and 20,000 yuan (US$136 to US$2,728) depending on their size — first went viral in 2021 on the e-commerce platform Taobao, attracting national headlines. Ahead of the real-estate magnate’s inauguration for a second term on Monday next week,
RSS