British Foreign Secretary David Miliband is in China to lobby for further nuclear sanctions on Iran and will seek to smooth rancor with Beijing over climate change talks and the execution of a British drug smuggler thought to be mentally ill.
Miliband’s visit is a further step in the push by Britain, the US and others to persuade China to drop its opposition to a fourth round of sanctions to pressure Iran to suspend its uranium enrichment program.
China and Russia have been skeptical of the need for new sanctions, which UN diplomats say would target Iran’s powerful Revolutionary Guard and toughen existing measures against its shipping, banking and insurance sectors.
However, recent statements from Russian diplomats are seen as indicating that Moscow may be losing patience with Iran and moving closer to supporting sanctions. That would leave China — which depends on Iran for much of its energy needs — as the only one of the five veto-wielding permanent UN Security Council members opposed to new sanctions.
Miliband was to inaugurate the US$38 million British pavilion at the Shanghai Expo and visit a training base for Chinese UN peacekeepers yesterday.
He is scheduled to meet Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi (楊潔箎) and Premier Wen Jiabao (溫家寶) today and deliver a talk at the Foreign Affairs University in Beijing before leaving tomorrow.
The trip comes amid continuing friction between London and Beijing, played out through dueling accusations, diplomatic protests and statements in the media.
Ties bottomed out in December after China ignored personal appeals from British Prime Minister Gordon Brown not to execute 53-year-old Akmal Shaikh for drug smuggling. Shaikh’s family said he was mentally unstable and was lured to China from a life on the street in Poland by men playing on his dreams to record a pop song for world peace.
Brown said he was “appalled” by the execution — China’s first of a European citizen in nearly 60 years — prompting a warning from Beijing that such comments threatened to damage ties.
Even before that exchange, the two had clashed over December’s Copenhagen climate talks that ended without a binding agreement on emissions reductions.
In the aftermath, British Climate Change Minister Edward Miliband — David Miliband’s brother — published an editorial singling out China as the culprit behind the talks’ near collapse.
The bilateral friction comes as China’s relations with the US have also been fraught with tension over US arms sales to Taiwan, US President Barack Obama’s meeting with the Dalai Lama, trade issues and China’s handling of the Iran nuclear issue.
While Beijing has lately cooled its rhetoric over such issues, a fence-mending visit to Beijing this month by US Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg and Senior White House Asia adviser Jeffrey Bader apparently produced no breakthroughs.
Beijing insists the US is entirely responsible for the turbulence in ties and must take actions it does not specify to repair the rift.
Emboldened by its rising global clout and economic influence, analysts say the tough line taken by Beijing signals China’s growing willingness to confront those who challenge it.
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