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China and Germany agree on forces for war torn Sudanese

China and Germany said yesterday they were in agreement that the international force in Sudan had to be expanded in order to resolve the conflict in the African country peacefully.

German Defence Minister Franz Josef Jung informed reporters of the joint position following talks in Beijing with his Chinese counterpart Liang Guanglie (梁光烈).

Washington has been pressing Beijing to use its ties with the regime in Khartoum to help end the refugee crisis in the war-torn western region of Darfur.

China responded to the pressure yesterday by saying its influence in Sudan was being overestimated.

Meanwhile, Japanese Foreign Minister Masahiko Koumura was in China yesterday to discuss plans to jointly develop East China Sea gas fields amid rapidly warming relations between the two Asian economic giants, an official said.

Koumura and Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi (楊潔篪) also planned to discuss issues relating to North Korea, including Pyongyang’s pledge to reinvestigate the abduction of Japanese nationals as part of its spy program, Japanese foreign ministry spokesman Kazuo Kodama told reporters.

“We would appreciate any efforts on the part of the Chinese government to put pressure on the DPRK [North Korea] to come forward on this issue,” he said.

Japan has long had tense relations with North Korea due to the regime’s abduction of Japanese citizens in the 1970s and 1980s to train its spies in Japanese language and culture.

Tokyo has made it clear to China and its partners in the six-party nuclear North Korea talks that it would withhold energy aid for Pyongyang until the kidnapping issue was addressed, Kodama said.

North Korea admitted in 2002 to kidnapping 13 Japanese. It returned five victims and their families, while saying the eight others were dead.

But Japan says that North Korea is hiding survivors and has abducted more people than it acknowledges.

Koumura would also attend a Japan Olympic Committee reception in Beijing, Japan’s foreign ministry said.

In other news from Beijing, Chinese police have detained at least 17 foreigners in a crackdown on illegal ticket sales outside Olympic venues, state media said yesterday.

The foreign nationals of unidentified countries were among 110 people arrested in a sweep of ticket touts near the Olympic Green and the Wukesong basketball stadium on Friday, the semi-official China News Service quoted officials as saying.

An earlier report by Xinhua news agency quoted Beijing police spokesman Shi Weiping as saying a Dutch citizen was caught trying to sell 24 tickets for more than 10 times their face value near the Water Cube aquatics’ center on Friday.

A Chinese woman was also arrested for offering two gymnastics tickets with a face value of 150 yuan for 1,000 yuan each, Shi said.

Police official Wang Wenjie told the China Daily newspaper that about 340 tickets were confiscated in Friday’s operation.
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