US and Chinese military officials will hold talks on rules of behavior at the Pentagon today and tomorrow, a US official said, days after the US denounced what it called a “dangerous” Chinese jet intercept of a US Navy patrol plane.
On Tuesday last week, a Chinese fighter pilot flew acrobatic maneuvers around the US Navy’s P-8 Poseidon anti-submarine and reconnaissance plane, crossing over and under it in international airspace over the South China Sea, the Pentagon said.
At one point, the jet flew wingtip-to-wingtip about 9m from the Poseidon, then performed a barrel roll over the top of it.
The US defense official said other close intercepts occurred in March, April and May.
While this week’s discussions at the Pentagon were planned long before the recent incidents, they touch on issues at the core of the US concerns about Chinese military behavior: that a Chinese provocation could spiral into a broader crisis sparked by a military miscalculation in the disputed territory.
China’s sovereignty claims over the strategic stretch of mineral-rich water off its southern coast and to the east of mainland Southeast Asia set it directly against US allies Vietnam and the Philippines, while Taiwan, Brunei and Malaysia also lay claim to parts of the disputed area.
The meetings involve a working group to discuss existing multilateral standards of behavior for air and maritime activities, the defense official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Assistant Deputy Chief of US Naval Operations Rear Admiral James Foggo is among the US military officials attending, the official said.
It was not immediately clear which Chinese officials would participate.
The US and Chinese militaries have boosted their contacts in recent years amid recognition that, as China’s economic interests continue to expand, it will play a bigger security role in the world and have more interactions with the US military.
Still, the recent intercepts show that those increased contacts have not eliminated friction between the two.
In April 2001, a similar aggressive intercept of a US EP-3E spy plane by a Chinese F-8 fighter in the same area resulted in a collision that killed the Chinese pilot and forced the US plane to make an emergency landing at a base on China’s Hainan Island.
The 24 US air crew members were held for 11 days until Washington apologized for the incident.
That encounter soured US-Chinese relations in the early days of former US president George W. Bush’s first term.
China has denied wrongdoing in the latest incident and blamed the US, citing “large-scale and highly frequent close-in reconnaisssance.”
US Department of State spokeswoman Jen Psaki responded by saying the US operated “in a transparent manner.”
“We make other countries, including China, aware of our plans,” Psaki said.
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday inaugurated the Danjiang Bridge across the Tamsui River in New Taipei City, saying that the structure would be an architectural icon and traffic artery for Taiwan. Feted as a major engineering achievement, the Danjiang Bridge is 920m long, 211m tall at the top of its pylon, and is the longest single-pylon asymmetric cable-stayed bridge in the world, the government’s Web site for the structure said. It was designed by late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. The structure, with a maximum deck of 70m, accommodates road and light rail traffic, and affords a 200m navigation channel for boats,
PRECISION STRIKES: The most significant reason to deploy HIMARS to outlying islands is to establish a ‘dead zone’ that the PLA would not dare enter, a source said A High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) would be deployed to Penghu County and Dongyin Island (東引) in Lienchiang County (Matsu) to force the Chinese military to retreat at least 100km from the coastline, a military source said yesterday. Taiwan has been procuring HIMARS and Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) from the US in batches. Once all batches have been delivered, Taiwan would possess 111 HIMARS units and 504 ATACMS, which have a range of 300km. Considering that “offense is the best defense,” the military plans to forward-deploy the systems to outlying islands such as Penghu and Dongyin so that
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest foundry service provider, yesterday said that global semiconductor revenue is projected to hit US$1.5 trillion in 2030, after the figure exceeds US$1 trillion this year, as artificial intelligence (AI) demand boosts consumption of token and compute power. “We are still at the beginning of the AI revolution, but we already see a significant impact across the whole semiconductor ecosystem,” TSMC deputy cochief operating officer Kevin Zhang (張曉強) said at the company’s annual technology symposium in Hsinchu City. “It is fair to say that in the past decade, smartphones and other mobile devices were
‘CLEAR MESSAGE’: The bill would set up an interagency ‘tiger team’ to review sanctions tools and other economic options to help deter any Chinese aggression toward Taiwan US Representative Young Kim has introduced a bill to deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan, calling for an interagency “tiger team” to preplan coordinated sanctions and economic measures in response to possible Chinese military or political action against Taiwan. “[Chinese President] Xi Jinping [習近平] has directed the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. China has a plan. America should have one too,” Kim said in a news release on Thursday last week. She introduced the “Deter PRC [People’s Republic of China] aggression against Taiwan act” to “ensure the US has a coordinated sanctions strategy ready should
RSS