Defection casts pall over US-China relations

The Taiwanese newspaper that broke the story on the apparent defection of a Chinese military officer to the US named him yesterday and said his wife was still in Beijing.

The paper, in a front page story, identified the People's Liberation Army (PLA) senior colonel as Xu Junping (徐俊平). It said Xu's defection was a "grave incident" in China-US ties and cast a cloud over military exchanges.

The newspaper said Xu's wife was still in Beijing. It gave no further details.

Britain's Daily Telegraph reported yesterday that Xu, a fluent English-speaker and former Harvard scholar, had travelled to the US on his own and contacted the CIA out of the blue.

He reportedly provided Washington with precise details of what Chinese Vice Premier Qian Qichen (錢其琛) was going to say during his visit to the US.

Xu was in charge of all Chinese military contacts with the US and was the main point of contact for all visiting US military delegations.

The Daily Telegraph reported that Xu was increasingly dissatisfied with his job and angered his superiors with "insufficiently orthodox" views on NATO's bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999, which had stymied his prospects for promotion.

Earlier, The Washington Post, in a story from Beijing, said China's intelligence community believed US officials in Beijing arranged for the defector's wife to attend a party at the US embassy, gave her travel documents and sent her to the US.

The revelation came as Qian visited Washington and a US naval warship sailed into Shanghai's bustling port to shore up US-China military ties.

US sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, have confirmed that a Chinese military officer defected to the US at the end of last year while visiting as part of a Chinese delegation.

Asked about the defector, US Secretary of State Colin Powell said: "The situation is that the Chinese asked us last December to locate an individual who was missing.

"We located that individual, made sure that the person was in good health, made the Chinese aware of his presence and that's as far as I would like to go on it," he told the American Newspaper Association.

In the first official comment on media reports on the defection, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said on Friday an investigation is being conducted on a PLA officer who left China and did not return.

The Taiwanese paper broke the story on the defection on Wednesday. It said the defector was a member of the PLA general staff and part of a disarmament delegation touring the US and Canada last year.

It said the defector would have been able to provide Washington with intelligence on Beijing's non-proliferation policies.

The newspaper said Beijing had repeatedly demanded the return of the colonel.

The Washington Post cited a Chinese source as saying US officials arranged for the officer to defect before his visit and helped him disappear once the Chinese delegation arrived in the US.

In August 1999, retired major general Liu Liankun (劉連昆) and senior colonel Shao Zhengzhong (邵正忠) were executed for selling state secrets to Taiwan for at least US$1.6 million in China's biggest spying scandal of the Communist era. They were convicted by a military court of providing information on China's military deployments against Taiwan.