Japan raised the stakes yesterday in a row with China over five North Korean asylum seekers dragged from its northeastern consulate by Chinese police with a decision to send a senior vice minister to Beijing.
News of the move came a day after an angry Japan dismissed Chinese reports that its diplomats had allowed police to enter the consulate in Shenyang last Wed-nesday to drag out the North Koreans who had rushed inside, apparently to seek asylum.
Senior Vice Foreign Minister Seiken Sugiura was to be sent to Beijing as early as today to negotiate with China on the handover of the North Koreans -- two men, two women and a child, Japanese media reported quoting government sources.
"Although the decision is not 100 percent final, it is highly likely and we are moving in that direction," a Foreign Ministry official said.
"It would not be to investigate but more to negotiate with Chinese officials, to repeat Japan's basic stance that they must be handed over and that efforts must be made to prevent a recurrence," he said.
The vice minister would leave as soon as possible, he added.
The decision to send a high-ranking politician rather than a bureaucrat was intended to underscore Tokyo's anger over the incident, domestic newspapers quoted an unidentified senior Foreign Ministry official as saying.
Meanwhile, two North Koreans have sought refuge in the Canadian Embassy in Beijing and are asking for passage overseas, an embassy spokeswoman said yesterday.
The man and the woman appear to be in their late 20s or early 30s and got into the embassy together on Saturday, said spokeswoman Jennifer May. It was unclear if they are married, she said.
Canadian diplomats are negotiating their passage with Chinese officials and "would like to see them on their way as quickly as possible," May said. "They are in the embassy and we are looking after them."
The pair evaded Chinese police patrols and security that has increased dramatically in Beijing's embassy districts following the recent rash of asylum bids by North Koreans.
More than two dozen of them have barged past guards and clambered over walls of foreign missions in the Chinese capital in the past two months and won passage to South Korea.
Last week, three North Korean men climbed walls of the US consulate in Shenyang. They were still there yesterday while US diplomats negotiated with Chinese officials, a consulate spokeswoman said on customary condition of anonymity.
FAST RELEASE: The council lauded the developer for completing model testing in only four days and releasing a commercial version for use by academia and industry The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) yesterday released the latest artificial intelligence (AI) language model in traditional Chinese embedded with Taiwanese cultural values. The council launched the Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine (TAIDE) program in April last year to develop and train traditional Chinese-language models based on LLaMA, the open-source AI language model released by Meta. The program aims to tackle the information bias that is often present in international large-scale language models and take Taiwanese culture and values into consideration, it said. Llama 3-TAIDE-LX-8B-Chat-Alpha1, released yesterday, is the latest large language model in traditional Chinese. It was trained based on Meta’s Llama-3-8B
STUMPED: KMT and TPP lawmakers approved a resolution to suspend the rate hike, which the government said was unavoidable in view of rising global energy costs The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday said it has a mandate to raise electricity prices as planned after the legislature passed a non-binding resolution along partisan lines to freeze rates. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers proposed the resolution to suspend the price hike, which passed by a 59-50 vote. The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) voted with the KMT. Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) of the KMT said the resolution is a mandate for the “immediate suspension of electricity price hikes” and for the Executive Yuan to review its energy policy and propose supplementary measures. A government-organized electricity price evaluation board in March
NO-LIMITS PARTNERSHIP: ‘The bottom line’ is that if the US were to have a conflict with China or Russia it would likely open up a second front with the other, a US senator said Beijing and Moscow could cooperate in a conflict over Taiwan, the top US intelligence chief told the US Senate this week. “We see China and Russia, for the first time, exercising together in relation to Taiwan and recognizing that this is a place where China definitely wants Russia to be working with them, and we see no reason why they wouldn’t,” US Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines told a US Senate Committee on Armed Services hearing on Thursday. US Senator Mike Rounds asked Haines about such a potential scenario. He also asked US Defense Intelligence Agency Director Lieutenant General Jeffrey Kruse
NOVEL METHODS: The PLA has adopted new approaches and recently conducted three combat readiness drills at night which included aircraft and ships, an official said Taiwan is monitoring China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) exercises for changes in their size or pattern as the nation prepares for president-elect William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20, National Security Bureau (NSB) Director-General Tsai Ming-yen (蔡明彥) said yesterday. Tsai made the comment at a meeting of the Legislative Yuan’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee, in response to Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Wang Ting-yu’s (王定宇) questions. China continues to employ a carrot-and-stick approach, in which it applies pressure with “gray zone” tactics, while attempting to entice Taiwanese with perks, Tsai said. These actions aim to help Beijing look like it has