A condition for the resumption of bilateral climate talks between China and the US is Washington dispelling the “negative influence” left by US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan last month, Beijing said yesterday.
In response to the visit on Aug. 2 and 3, China on Aug. 5 suspended bilateral cooperation with the US in a number of areas, including climate talks and dialogue between senior-level military commanders.
In an interview with the Financial Times on Tuesday, US Special Envoy on Climate Change John Kerry — who earlier this month said the suspension of bilateral climate talks punished the entire world — urged Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to resume the discussions.
Photo: AFP
Kerry told the newspaper that he was hopeful the countries could “get back together” ahead of the UN’s COP27 climate summit in November in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.
China yesterday responded to Kerry’s remarks by stating that the resumption of climate talks with the US was dependent on actions taken by Washington to address the “negative influence” of Pelosi’s Taiwan visit.
“The US side should dispel the negative influence of Pelosi scuttling to Taiwan, this is an indispensable condition of China-US climate change cooperation,” the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement.
The statement also said that China would continue to participate in international forums on climate change.
Beijing’s response highlights the divergent approaches to global climate change cooperation between the world’s two largest powers.
While officials in the administration of US President Joe Biden, including Kerry, have repeatedly expressed hope that US-China cooperation on climate change would not be affected by tensions on other fronts, Beijing has rejected any separating of issues in US-China relations.
The nation’s fastest supercomputer, Nano 4 (晶創26), is scheduled to be launched in the third quarter, and would be used to train large language models in finance and national defense sectors, the National Center for High-Performance Computing (NCHC) said. The supercomputer, which would operate at about 86.05 petaflops, is being tested at a new cloud computing center in the Southern Taiwan Science Park in Tainan. The exterior of the server cabinet features chip circuitry patterns overlaid with a map of Taiwan, highlighting the nation’s central position in the semiconductor industry. The center also houses Taiwania 2, Taiwania 3, Forerunner 1 and
FIRST TRIAL: Ko’s lawyers sought reduced bail and other concessions, as did other defendants, but the bail judge denied their requests, citing the severity of the sentences Former Taipei mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) was yesterday sentenced to 17 years in prison and had his civil rights suspended for six years over corruption, embezzlement and other charges. Taipei prosecutors in December last year asked the Taipei District Court for a combined 28-year, six-month sentence for the four cases against Ko, who founded the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP). The cases were linked to the Core Pacific City (京華城購物中心) redevelopment project and the mismanagement of political donations. Other defendants convicted on separate charges included Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Taipei City Councilor Angela Ying (應曉薇), who was handed a 15-year, six-month sentence; Core Pacific
J-6 REMODEL: The converted drones are part of Beijing’s expanding mix of airpower weapons, including bombers with stand-off missiles and UAV swarms, the report said China has stationed obsolete supersonic fighters converted to attack drones at six air bases close to the Taiwan Strait, a report published this month by the Arlington, Virginia-based Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies said. Satellite imagery of the airfields from the institute’s “China Airpower Tracker” shows what appear to be lines of stubby, swept-winged aircraft matching the shape of J-6 fighters that first flew with the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Air Force in the 1960s. Since their conversion to drones, the aircraft have been identified at five bases in China’s Fujian Province and one in Guangdong Province, the report said. J.
China used fake LinkedIn profiles to harvest sensitive data from NATO and EU institutions by soliciting information from staff, a European security source said on Friday. The operation, allegedly orchestrated by the Chinese Ministry of State Security, targeted dozens of employees at the military alliance or EU organizations through fictitious accounts, the source said, confirming reports in French and Belgian media. Posing as recruiters on the online professional networking platform, Chinese spies would initially request paid reports before later soliciting non-public or even classified information. One particularly active fake profile used the name “Kevin Zhang,” claiming to be the head