The US has "strongly protested" to Beijing the deletion of a section about Taiwan by a state-owned television station in an interview visiting Secretary of State Colin Powell gave to the station over the weekend.
A State Department spokesman, Charles Hunter, said in Washington on Monday that Powell gave the historic interview on the condition that it would be shown in its entirety. That agreement was between the US Embassy and the Beijing Foreign Ministry.
But when the Saturday interview aired on Chinese Central TV (CCTV), sections on human rights and Taiwan were deleted.
The State Department said that this violated the agreement that led to the interview.
The Chinese Embassy in Washington, however, said the sections were removed to give time to the breaking news that a swimmer, Zhang Jian, had become the first Chinese in history to swim the English Channel.
"The CCTV people were pressed for time," Chinese embassy spokesman Zhang Yuanyuan said, noting Zhang Jian's swim. "That was a great piece of news," he said.
"They had to use a few minutes on that very interesting and very good story, so they had to sacrifice some time from that interview," he said.
"It was not a big deal," he said. "This isn't something the Chinese would like to hide. Everybody knows that we have disagreements on those issues, on Taiwan, on human rights," he said.
The deleted Taiwan segment was short. It went as follows:
Question: "China wishes to establish a constructive relation of cooperation with the United States, and we also attach a great deal of importance to the whole series of communiques between the United States and China which have been signed since President Nixon first visited China in the early 1970s. And in 1998 the US government reiterated its position toward Taiwan with the so-called `three no's.' So my question is, can you explicitly tell us, has the position been changed or not?"
Answer: "The position of the United States government in the Bush administration is that we believe the Taiwan Relations Act, and the three communiques that subsequently followed that act, are the basis of our relationship with China and are a sound enough basis for us to move forward in a positive way."
While Beijing recognizes the three communiques, it does not recognize the Taiwan Relations Act, which was passed by the US Congress in 1979 as a basis of unofficial Washington-Taipei ties since the US switched recognition to Beijing. While the questioner mentioned the communiques, he did not mention the act.
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