North Korean leader Kim Jong-il was believed to have arrived in Beijing yesterday on a secrecy-shrouded visit that experts say aims to secure economic support in exchange for a commitment to return to denuclearization talks.
For a third day, Chinese officials refused to confirm Kim was in the country, though he has been spotted by journalists several times since arriving aboard his armored train on Monday.
Yesterday afternoon, a fleet of black, North Korean-flagged limousines escorted by police was seen entering the Diaoyutai State Guest House in western Beijing where foreign leaders often stay on visits to the capital.
PHOTO: BLOOMBERG
Security was high around the sprawling compound of lakes and villas, with more police and soldiers posted along its walls and at access points.
South Korean media reported Kim was to be feted by Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) with a welcoming banquet at the Great Hall of the People last night before the two men and their delegations sit for summit talks today.
China is widely seen as the country with the most clout with Kim’s hardline communist government. Kim, who is known to shun air travel, has visited China five times since succeeding his father as ruler in 1994, most recently in 2006.
Japanese and South Korean media, which have been closely tracking Kim, reported that a train carrying Kim arrived in the booming port of Tianjin about one hour east of Beijing earlier yesterday.
Today’s discussions are expected to center on further financial help from China, already impoverished North Korea’s biggest source of food and fuel aid and main bulwark against tougher international sanctions.
Chinese investment, especially in North Korean natural resources, has been growing, although widespread economic chaos — most recently a botched currency reform effort — limits such opportunities.
Fearing the regime’s implosion and mass unrest on its border, China is expected to accede to new aid requests, said Cai Jian, deputy director of the Center for Korean Studies at Shanghai’s Fudan University. The sides may also start implementing a series of economic agreements signed during Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao’s (溫家寶) trip to Pyongyang last year, Cai said.
While China won’t link the issues explicitly, it will be expecting Kim to offer some new willingness to rejoin long-stalled six-nation talks sponsored by China under which Pyongyang agreed to dismantle its nuclear programs in return for aid.
“They want to break the deadlock so that North Korea could get back to the framework of the six-party talks,” Cai said.
An announcement during Kim’s visit could bring a new round of six-nation talks by June, following bilateral contacts between North Korea and the US, said Yang Moo-jin, a professor at University of North Korean Studies in Seoul.
“Hu Jintao will promise an active cooperation in Chinese economic aid and investment to North Korea, while Kim will respond by announcing his country’s return to the six-party talks and his commitment to denuclearization,” Yang said.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
RSS