Britain’s treasury chief made a pitch yesterday for Chinese banks to expand in London as he visited Beijing amid strains over Tibet and China’s trade surplus.
“We welcome participation by Chinese banks and other financial institutions,” British Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling told China’s top finance reform official, Vice Premier Wang Qishan (王岐山), as they began talks on financial cooperation.
“We want to contribute to the evolution of China’s financial markets,” Darling said.
Wang said Beijing wanted closer financial cooperation to jointly address global challenges. He said that included protecting the financial system “because of the continuous deepening of the US subprime crisis.”
Darling is the highest-ranking British official to visit China since Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s office said last week he would skip the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics in August.
Brown’s decision came amid demands by activists for foreign leaders to boycott the ceremony in protest over Beijing’s crackdown on protests in Tibet. But the prime minister’s office said the decision was unrelated to those demands and was not a gesture of protest.
Darling was in Beijing as part of a high-level British-Chinese dialogue on economics and finance. He was accompanied by executives of British and European banks and a London private equity firm.
Darling was expected to meet with the chairman of China’s US$200 billion state investment fund and lobby for investment in Britain.
Brown visited Beijing in January and made a similar invitation.
CHANGE OF MIND: The Chinese crew at first showed a willingness to cooperate, but later regretted that when the ship arrived at the port and refused to enter Togolese Republic-registered Chinese freighter Hong Tai (宏泰號) and its crew have been detained on suspicion of deliberately damaging a submarine cable connecting Taiwan proper and Penghu County, the Coast Guard Administration said in a statement yesterday. The case would be subject to a “national security-level investigation” by the Tainan District Prosecutors’ Office, it added. The administration said that it had been monitoring the ship since 7:10pm on Saturday when it appeared to be loitering in waters about 6 nautical miles (11km) northwest of Tainan’s Chiang Chun Fishing Port, adding that the ship’s location was about 0.5 nautical miles north of the No.
A Chinese freighter that allegedly snapped an undersea cable linking Taiwan proper to Penghu County is suspected of being owned by a Chinese state-run company and had docked at the ports of Kaohsiung and Keelung for three months using different names. On Tuesday last week, the Togo-flagged freighter Hong Tai 58 (宏泰58號) and its Chinese crew were detained after the Taipei-Penghu No. 3 submarine cable was severed. When the Coast Guard Administration (CGA) first attempted to detain the ship on grounds of possible sabotage, its crew said the ship’s name was Hong Tai 168, although the Automatic Identification System (AIS)
An Akizuki-class destroyer last month made the first-ever solo transit of a Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force ship through the Taiwan Strait, Japanese government officials with knowledge of the matter said yesterday. The JS Akizuki carried out a north-to-south transit through the Taiwan Strait on Feb. 5 as it sailed to the South China Sea to participate in a joint exercise with US, Australian and Philippine forces that day. The Japanese destroyer JS Sazanami in September last year made the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force’s first-ever transit through the Taiwan Strait, but it was joined by vessels from New Zealand and Australia,
COORDINATION, ASSURANCE: Separately, representatives reintroduced a bill that asks the state department to review guidelines on how the US engages with Taiwan US senators on Tuesday introduced the Taiwan travel and tourism coordination act, which they said would bolster bilateral travel and cooperation. The bill, proposed by US senators Marsha Blackburn and Brian Schatz, seeks to establish “robust security screenings for those traveling to the US from Asia, open new markets for American industry, and strengthen the economic partnership between the US and Taiwan,” they said in a statement. “Travel and tourism play a crucial role in a nation’s economic security,” but Taiwan faces “pressure and coercion from the Chinese Communist Party [CCP]” in this sector, the statement said. As Taiwan is a “vital trading
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