China’s five-month suspension in US-Chinese military contacts to protest Washington’s arms sales to Taiwan has ended with the visit this week of a US Defense Department official, a top Chinese officer said yesterday.
China put such exchanges on hold in October over a US$6.5 billion US arms sale to self-governing Taiwan, including such advanced weaponry as Patriot missiles and Apache attack helicopters. China, which regards Taiwan as a renegade province, said the sale interfered with internal Chinese affairs and harmed its national security.
In retaliation, Beijing canceled a US visit by a senior Chinese general, other similar visits and port calls by naval vessels. It also indefinitely postponed meetings on humanitarian assistance, disaster relief and stopping the spread of weapons of mass destruction.
Writing in the official English-language China Daily newspaper, Rear Admiral Yang Yi (楊毅) said formal contacts would resume with the exchanges yesterday and today between top Chinese officers and David Sedney, US deputy assistant secretary of defense for East Asian security affairs.
However, Yang said Beijing would continue to protest arms sales to Taiwan and rejected US criticisms over a lack of transparency in China’s military buildup.
“China will not tolerate any infringement into its core national interests and will make no concession on this principal issue,” Yang wrote.
“China’s reasonable military development and military transparency has long been an outstanding issue in Sino-US bilateral relations,” he said.
Yang also contended that improved relations between Taiwan and China over recent months have “deprived the US of any excuses for continued arms sales to the island.”
The US embassy said the talks were closed to the media, but a briefing would be held today. Meetings began early yesterday and were due to wind up either later in the day or this morning, the embassy said.
Nearly 20 years of annual double-digit percentage increases in China’s defense budget have raised concerns from the US and China’s neighbors, although Beijing says any worries are unfounded.
That figure will be closely scrutinized when the national legislature opens for its annual session next month, amid from falling exports and declining tax revenues.
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
POLITICAL PATRIARCHS: Recent clashes between Thailand and Cambodia are driven by an escalating feud between rival political families, analysts say The dispute over Thailand and Cambodia’s contested border, which dates back more than a century to disagreements over colonial-era maps, has broken into conflict before. However, the most recent clashes, which erupted on Thursday, have been fueled by another factor: a bitter feud between two powerful political patriarchs. Cambodian Senate President and former prime minister Hun Sen, 72, and former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, 76, were once such close friends that they reportedly called one another brothers. Hun Sen has, over the years, supported Thaksin’s family during their long-running power struggle with Thailand’s military. Thaksin and his sister Yingluck stayed
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
RESTRUCTURE: Myanmar’s military has ended emergency rule and announced plans for elections in December, but critics said the move aims to entrench junta control Myanmar’s military government announced on Thursday that it was ending the state of emergency declared after it seized power in 2021 and would restructure administrative bodies to prepare for the new election at the end of the year. However, the polls planned for an unspecified date in December face serious obstacles, including a civil war raging over most of the country and pledges by opponents of the military rule to derail the election because they believe it can be neither free nor fair. Under the restructuring, Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing is giving up two posts, but would stay at the
RSS