Washington stands with countries fighting Chinese “bullying behavior,” US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said yesterday, as he launched bilateral talks in Australia aimed at countering Beijing’s growing influence in the Indo-Pacific region.
Austin and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in the Australian city of Brisbane late on Thursday ahead of annual bilateral meetings yesterday and today that would focus on a deal to provide Australia, a defense treaty partner, with a fleet of submarines powered by US nuclear technology.
Ahead of a meeting with Australian Minister for Defense Richard Marles, Austin said both countries share concerns about China’s break from international laws and norms that resolve disputes peacefully and without coercion.
Photo: AFP
“We’ve seen troubling PRC coercion from the East China Sea, to the South China Sea, to right here in the Southwest Pacific,” Austin told reporters, referring to the People’s Republic of China.
“We’ll continue to support our allies and partners, as they defend themselves from bullying behavior,” he added.
China has imposed a series of official and unofficial trade barriers in the past few years against Australian exports, including coal, wine, barley, beef, seafood and wood. The barriers are widely seen as a punitive reaction to Australian government policy that has cost Australian exporters as much as US$15 billion a year.
Canberra’s icy relationship with Beijing was thawing since a change of Australian government at elections last year.
Meanwhile, the sharing of US nuclear secrets with Australia takes that bilateral relationship to a new level.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is planning state visits to the US and China before the end of the year.
Under the AUKUS partnership — an acronym for Australia, the UK and the US — Australia is to buy three Virginia-class submarines from the US and build five of a new AUKUS-class submarine in cooperation with Britain.
Australian media have focused on a letter signed by more than 20 Republican lawmakers to US President Joe Biden that warned the deal would “unacceptably weaken the US fleet” without a plan to boost US submarine production.
Albanese said he remained “very confident” that the US would deliver the three submarines.
The prime minister said he had been reassured by discussions he had with Republicans and Democrats earlier this month at a NATO summit in Lithuania.
“What struck me was their unanimous support for AUKUS, their unanimous support for the relationship between the Australia and United States,” Albanese said.
Marles agreed the AUKUS program was on track.
“Congress can be a complicated place as legislation makes its way through it, but actually we’re encouraged by how quickly it is going through it and we are expecting that there will be lots of discussions on the way through,” Marles said.
“Fundamentally, we have reached an agreement with the Biden administration about how Australia acquires the nuclear-powered submarine capability and we’re proceeding along that path with pace,” he added.
Australia understood there was “pressure on the American industrial base” and would contribute to submarine production, Marles said.
Tropical Storm Usagi strengthened to a typhoon yesterday morning and remains on track to brush past southeastern Taiwan from tomorrow to Sunday, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. As of 2pm yesterday, the storm was approximately 950km east-southeast of Oluanpi (鵝鑾鼻), Taiwan proper’s southernmost point, the CWA said. It is expected to enter the Bashi Channel and then turn north, moving into waters southeast of Taiwan, it said. The agency said it could issue a sea warning in the early hours of today and a land warning in the afternoon. As of 2pm yesterday, the storm was moving at
DISCONTENT: The CCP finds positive content about the lives of the Chinese living in Taiwan threatening, as such video could upset people in China, an expert said Chinese spouses of Taiwanese who make videos about their lives in Taiwan have been facing online threats from people in China, a source said yesterday. Some young Chinese spouses of Taiwanese make videos about their lives in Taiwan, often speaking favorably about their living conditions in the nation compared with those in China, the source said. However, the videos have caught the attention of Chinese officials, causing the spouses to come under attack by Beijing’s cyberarmy, they said. “People have been messing with the YouTube channels of these Chinese spouses and have been harassing their family members back in China,”
The Central Weather Administration (CWA) yesterday said there are four weather systems in the western Pacific, with one likely to strengthen into a tropical storm and pose a threat to Taiwan. The nascent tropical storm would be named Usagi and would be the fourth storm in the western Pacific at the moment, along with Typhoon Yinxing and tropical storms Toraji and Manyi, the CWA said. It would be the first time that four tropical cyclones exist simultaneously in November, it added. Records from the meteorology agency showed that three tropical cyclones existed concurrently in January in 1968, 1991 and 1992.
GEOPOLITICAL CONCERNS: Foreign companies such as Nissan, Volkswagen and Konica Minolta have pulled back their operations in China this year Foreign companies pulled more money from China last quarter, a sign that some investors are still pessimistic even as Beijing rolls out stimulus measures aimed at stabilizing growth. China’s direct investment liabilities in its balance of payments dropped US$8.1 billion in the third quarter, data released by the Chinese State Administration of Foreign Exchange showed on Friday. The gauge, which measures foreign direct investment (FDI) in China, was down almost US$13 billion for the first nine months of the year. Foreign investment into China has slumped in the past three years after hitting a record in 2021, a casualty of geopolitical tensions,
RSS