Chindia Alert: You’ll be Living in their World Very Soon
aims to alert you to the threats and opportunities that China and India present. China and India require serious attention; case of ‘hidden dragon and crouching tiger’.
Without this attention, governments, businesses and, indeed, individuals may find themselves at a great disadvantage sooner rather than later.
The POSTs (front webpages) are mainly 'cuttings' from reliable sources, updated continuously.
The PAGEs (see Tabs, above) attempt to make the information more meaningful by putting some structure to the information we have researched and assembled since 2006.
Inspired by early colour television, method can create thousands of alloys quickly
Leader of Beijing team says a ‘revolution in material science’ is close to hand
Speedy development of alloys may accelerate programmes to explore the harsh environments of space and ocean depths. Photo: Xinhua
Chinese physicists say they have developed a method that can cut the time involved in the discovery of alloys from years to hours.
The technique has led to the creation of high performance alloys, including the world’s toughest amorphous metal, or metallic glass, for use in extremely hot environments.
The search for an alloy typically takes years, but now it can be done in less than two hours, the Chinese researchers said.
Part of their findings was published in the journal Nature this month.
Inspired by the colour gun method used to create images for television sets, the Beijing
In the conventional method, metals needed to be weighed, melted to an alloy and tested for performance. To find the right formula, researchers might need to test more than a thousand combinations and each test might take a day or two.
Professor Wang Weihua, researcher with the institute of physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and lead scientist of the study, said his team’s research was inspired by early colour televisions, which used three electric devices known as guns that fired red, green and blue light onto the back of the screen to create real-world colours for the viewer.
Wang’s team’s alloy technology also involved three guns, but instead of electronic pulses they fired “bullets” made of different metals. These struck a silicon board simultaneously and fused to form alloys.
Chinese University becomes first in world to build and test its own hypersonic plane
Sensors quickly measured the alloys’ properties and picked the most appropriate for the researchers.
This approach allowed scientists to create more than 1,000 samples, test their performance and select the most promising within a couple of hours.
“We proved it works,” Wang said. “It will increase people’s confidence. There will be a revolution in material science.”
The alloy reported in the Nature paper contained iridium, nickel and tantalum. It had a distorted atomic structure similar to that of glass. Metallic glasses can be extremely strong but they usually weaken by temperatures of 400 degrees Celsius or more.
The Beijing team hopes artificial intelligence, in tandem with its technique, will start a materials revolution. Photo: Handout
The new alloy can maintain a tensile strength nearly eight times that of steel at more than 700 degrees Celsius, researchers said.
It can also remain intact for months in aqua regia, the mixture of nitric acid and hydrochloric acid that can dissolve gold and platinum.
Such properties make the alloy an ideal candidate material for manufacturing critical components for use in harsh environments such as space, ocean depths and battlefields.
“We are introducing artificial intelligence into the design and search for new amorphous metals,” Wang said. “It can further increase the speed of discoveries. In the near future, we may even be able to create material on demand.
It was close to midnight and Vlada, a Serbian engineer, was speeding towards his apartment in Belgrade. He had taken his 20-year-old son out that evening but bombs had started to fall across the Yugoslav capital. The power grid was down and he wanted to get home.
Nato, the world’s most powerful military alliance, had been pummelling Yugoslavia from the skies since late March to try to bring a halt to atrocities committed by President Slobodan Milosevic’s forces against ethnic Albanians in the province of Kosovo. It was now 7 May 1999 and the US-dominated air campaign was only growing more intense.
Vlada’s family had spent many nights in recent weeks huddled with others in the basement of their apartment building as air raid sirens blared outside, praying that an errant missile wouldn’t strike their homes.
They were lucky, some thought, to live just next to the Chinese embassy – an important diplomatic mission. Being there would surely protect them.
But as Vlada and his son approached the glass doors of their building in the dark, US B-2 stealth warplanes were in the skies above Belgrade. They were locked-on to the precise co-ordinates of a target selected and cleared by the CIA. All Vlada heard at first was the whoosh of an incoming missile. There was no time to move. The doors shattered, spraying glass at them.
“The force of the first bomb lifted us off the ground and we fell… Then one after the other [more bombs landed] – bam, bam, bam. All the shutters on the block were ripped off by the blast, it broke all the windows.”
They were terrified but uninjured. All five bombs had hit the embassy, 100 metres away.
The US and Nato were already facing scrutiny over mounting civilian casualties in a bombing campaign conducted without UN authorisation and fiercely opposed by China and Russia. They had now attacked a symbol of Chinese sovereignty in the heart of the Balkans.
Image copyright SASA STANKOVIC/EPA/REX/SHUTTERSTOCKImage caption Embassy workers escaped through windows after the strikesAcross town, Shen Hong, a well-connected Chinese businessman, was getting word that the embassy had been hit. He refused to believe it. Just a few days earlier, his father had phoned from Shanghai and joked that his son should park his new Mercedes at the diplomatic compound to keep it safe.
“I called a policeman who I knew and he said, ‘Yes, Shen, it’s really hit’. He said come right away, so then I knew it was real, it was true.”
He arrived to a scene of chaos. The embassy was burning; workers covered in blood and dust were climbing out of windows to escape. Politicians close to Milosevic – who had been charged two weeks earlier with crimes against humanity by an international tribunal – were already arriving to denounce the bombing as the latest example of Nato barbarity.
“We could not go inside. There was a lot of smoke, there wasn’t any electricity and we couldn’t see anything. It was horrible,” said Shen.
Image copyright LAZARA MARINKOVICImage caption Shen Hong lost close friends in the bombingHe spotted the cultural attaché, a man he knew, who had knotted together curtains to get out of a first-floor window. “We didn’t see that he was injured and he didn’t notice it either. It was only when I shook his hand that I realised my hands were covered in blood. I told him ‘you’re injured, you’re injured!’ – but when he saw this he passed out.”
The next day Shen would learn that two close friends – newlywed journalists Xu Xinghu, 31, and Zhu Ying, 27 – had been killed by a bomb that hit the sleeping quarters of the embassy. Their bodies were found under a collapsed wall.
The pair had worked for the Guangming (Enlightenment) Daily – a communist party newspaper. Xu, a language graduate who spoke fluent Serbian, had chronicled life in Belgrade during the bombings in a series of special reports called “Living Under Gunfire”.
Image copyright DRASKO GAGOVIC/EPA
Zhu Ying worked as an art editor in the paper’s advertising department. Her mother collapsed with grief and was sent to hospital when she learned of her daughter’s death so Zhu’s father travelled alone to Belgrade to see the body.
A third journalist, 48-year-old Shao Yunhuan, of the Xinhua news agency, also died. Her husband, Cao Rongfei, was blinded. The embassy’s military attaché, who is believed to have run an intelligence cell from the building, was sent back to China in a coma. In total, three people were killed and at least 20 injured.
For Shen, this was an act of war. The next day he led a protest through the streets of Belgrade carrying a sign reading “NATO: Nazi American Terrorist Organisation”
It was a sign of what was to come.
Image copyright REUTERSImage caption Three journalists were killed in the embassy
Within hours of the bombing, two competing narratives began to emerge. They would harden over the coming months and form the basis of how the incident – which continues to linger over the US-China relationship – remains debated today.
The bombing fuelled speculation, and there was no shortage of unanswered questions and missing pieces that were put together by some to imply a grand conspiracy. Intrigue continued to hang over the incident and, months afterwards, two respected European newspapers suggested the strikes were by design.
But, as former Nato officials point out, in 20 years no clear evidence has come to light proving what almost all of China believes and America strenuously denies: that it was deliberate.
In those first hours after the bombs fell, the US and Nato wasted no time to announce that it was an accident. China’s representative at the UN, meanwhile, denounced a “crime of war” and a “barbarian act”.
In Brussels, Jamie Shea – the British Nato spokesman who became the public face of the war – was woken up in the middle of the night and told he would have to face the world’s press in the morning. The information available in those early hours was thin but he would give one of the first explanations of what had happened, along with an apology. The warplanes, he said from the briefing podium, had “struck the wrong building”.
“It’s like a train accident or a car crash – you know what has happened but what you don’t know is why it has happened,” he says 20 years later. “That took a lot longer to establish… But it was clear right from the get-go, that targeting a foreign embassy was not part of the Nato plan.”
Image copyright BORIS SUBASIC/EPAImage caption The father of Zhu Ying weeps over her coffin in BelgradeIt would take more than a month for the US to give Beijing a full explanation: that a series of basic errors had led to five GPS-guided bombs striking China’s embassy – including one that hurtled through the roof of the ambassador’s residence next to the main building but didn’t explode, likely sparing his life.
The real target, officials said, was the headquarters of the Yugoslav Federal Directorate for Supply and Procurement (FDSP) – a state agency that imported and exported defence equipment. The grey office building is still there today – hundreds of metres down the road from the embassy site.
Nato had initially hoped the bombing campaign would only last a few days until Milosevic gave up, pulled his forces out of Kosovo and allowed peacekeepers in. But by the time the embassy was hit it had stretched to more than six weeks. In the rush to find hundreds of new targets to sustain the aerial assault, the CIA, which was not normally involved in target-picking, had decided the FDSP should be struck.
But America’s premier intelligence agency said it had used a bad map.
“In simple terms, one of our planes attacked the wrong target because the bombing instructions were based on an outdated map,” US defence secretary William Cohen said two days after the bombing. He was referring to a US government map that apparently did not show the correct location of the Chinese embassy nor the FDSP.
All US intelligence officers had was an address for the FDSP – 2 Bulevar Umetnosti – and a basic military navigation technique was used to approximate its co-ordinates. The technique used was so imprecise, CIA chief George Tenet later said, that it should never have been used to pick out a target for aerial bombing.
To compound the initial error, Tenet said, intelligence and military databases used to cross-check targets did not have the embassy’s new location listed, despite the fact that many US diplomats had actually been inside the building.
Had anyone on the ground visited the site to be bombed they would have found a gated compound, a five-storey building with a green-tiled oriental sloped roof, a bronze plaque announcing the embassy’s presence and a large, bright red Chinese flag fluttering more than 10 metres in the air.
Image copyright SASA STANKOVIC/EPA/REX/SHUTTERSTOCKImage caption The front of the embassy was largely undamagedThe crux of the CIA’s explanation was hard for many to believe: the world’s most advanced military had bombed a fellow UN Security Council member and one of the most vocal opponents of the Nato air campaign because of a mapping error. China was having none of it. The story, it said, was “not convincing”.
“The Chinese government and people cannot accept the conclusion that the bombing was a mistake,” the foreign minister told a US envoy sent to Beijing in June 1999 to explain what had happened.
But why would the US intentionally attack China?
It wasn’t long after the Sun rose on the morning of Saturday, 8 May 1999, that David Rank, a US diplomat, got out of bed in Beijing.
He turned on the television and switched to CNN. The American news network was carrying live pictures of the smouldering Chinese embassy in pitch-dark Belgrade.
By that afternoon, thousands of irate Chinese protesters would be gathered outside. But Rank, at that stage, was fairly calm. He rang his boss, the head of the political section: “I said, you know, Jim, this is the damndest thing.”
The diplomat rushed from his residence to the embassy down the road, where US officials were trying to figure out what had happened. Something had clearly gone wrong but this must have been, had to have been, a tragic mistake.
“It was so patently obvious that it was a sort of fog of war accident… At that point I didn’t think that down the road this was going to be a major problem. Obviously, it was a major problem, but not the sort of convulsive incident that it turned out to be,” said Rank.
But in the next hours, the shape of how the Chinese government and people would respond started to become clear.
Image copyright PETER ROGERS/GETTY IMAGESRank began receiving calls from liberal Chinese friends who were outraged at the bombing. American journalists got similar calls from Chinese contacts with pro-US views, expressing shock and a sense of betrayal.
Chinese state media was already laying out a clear narrative – the US had breached international law by bombing a Chinese diplomatic outpost. “The language that I heard from lots and lots of Chinese, it was identical. It was the same almost word-for-word lines of real anger,” said Rank.
By that afternoon thousands of students were streaming onto the streets of Beijing. They gathered outside the embassy and things quickly turned violent.
“They were pulling up the paving stones. Beijing sidewalks aren’t paved, they have big tiles and they were pulling those up and smashing them and throwing them over the walls.”
Image copyright PETER ROGERS/GETTY IMAGESMany of those bits of concrete were crashing through the windows of a building where more than a dozen embassy staff, including US Ambassador James Sasser, had hunkered down. Embassy cars were being defaced and attacked.
The message was clear: the bombing was intentional and, as one slogan went, “the blood of Chinese must be repaid”. The protests would continue the next day, with even more people – some reports said 100,000 – storming the diplomatic district, and pelting stones, paint, eggs and concrete at the British and American embassies.
“We feel like we’re hostages,” Bill Palmer, an embassy spokesman trapped in one of the buildings, said at the time.
Demonstrations of this scale had not been seen in tightly-controlled China in the decade since students led a pro-democracy uprising in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989. This time the anger was directed away from the Communist Party but, with the 10th anniversary of the crackdown on students in Tiananmen approaching, the government had to strike a balance between giving vent to public anger and remaining in control.
In a rare TV address Vice-President Hu Jintao endorsed the protests but also warned they had to remain “in accordance with the law”.
Image copyright REUTERSImage caption US Ambassador James Sasser was trapped in the embassy for four days as protests ragedThe uproar was not isolated to Beijing. Crowds also took to the streets of Shanghai and other cities that weekend. In central Chengdu, the US consul’s residence was set alight.
Weiping Qin, a then 19-year-old student leader at the maritime college in southern Guangzhou city, said demonstrators were not informed that Nato had already apologised for what it said was an accident. “The government was hiding this important message. They didn’t tell us – so young people, everybody, felt angry. We just wanted to go in the streets and protest against the United States.”
He said that initially students at his college were told they had to stay in their dormitories. But 24 hours after the bombing, the university leadership told him that they needed 30,000 students in the streets around the US consulate – 500 of whom would come from the maritime college.
The fired-up students drew lots to choose who could attend. They were loaded onto buses and given statements to read that echoed the stilted official language being broadcast by state media. “They gave us long sentences. But in the street, to speak out in long sentences is very hard.” He decided to yell slogans about the evils of Nato and the US instead.
Image copyright WEIPING QINImage caption Weiping Qin (right) was a student leader at Guangzhou Maritime College in 1999“We were just young people and we just felt angry. Our emotions came out like a wave,” said Qin, who now lives in the US and criticises the Chinese government in YouTube videos.
David Rank agreed that the anger was genuine. “I think it would really sell the Chinese people short to say this was manufactured by the system,” he said. “There was real outrage.”
Since the early 1990s, China had embarked on a concerted campaign to instil nationalism and “patriotic education” in its people. The narrative pushed in school textbooks, university classrooms and the media was that China – home to a great and benevolent civilisation – had been subjugated and humiliated at the hands of Western powers. The Belgrade embassy bombing fit the story.
“The anger that ordinary Chinese felt I think can only be understood in that historical context, being socialised to resent the West,” said Peter Gries, a professor of Chinese politics at Manchester University and an expert on Chinese nationalism.
For Liu Mingfu – a retired People’s Liberation Army colonel known for his hardline views of the US – the embassy bombing was part of a series of events that proved the US was engaged in a “new Cold War against China”.
“It was totally intentional. It was a purposeful, planned bombing, rather than an accident,” he said.
China would receive $28m in compensation from the US for the bombing, but had to give back close to $3m for the damage to US diplomatic property in Beijing and elsewhere. The US paid another $4.5m to the families of the dead and injured.
On the day of the bombing, Dusan Janjic, an academic and advocate for ethnic reconciliation in Yugoslavia, was having lunch at an upscale restaurant in central Belgrade with a man he considered a good friend.
Ren Baokai was the military attaché at the Chinese embassy and Janjic said he was surprisingly open with him about the fact that China was spying on Nato and US operations and tracking warplanes from its Belgrade outpost. The attaché invited him to dinner at the embassy that night because he knew he liked Chinese food.
“And I started making jokes. ‘Come on, you’re going to be bombed! I’m not coming!’,” Janjic recalled. He was being facetious: he did not actually think the embassy would be hit.
But Janjic couldn’t make it to dinner and that evening, when the missiles flew into the building, Ren was thrown to the ceiling by the blast and then fell through a crater left by a bomb. He was found in the basement in a coma only the next morning.
Citing Nato sources, they reported that the embassy was being used as a rebroadcast station for Yugoslav army communications and was as a result removed from a prohibited target list. US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright decried the story as “balderdash”, while British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook said there was “not a single shred of evidence” to support it.
But two decades later, Jens Holsoe, Politiken’s correspondent in the Balkans from 1995 to 2004, and John Sweeney, formerly of the Observer and now with the BBC, said they stood by their reporting that the bombing was intentional.
Holsoe said what made him investigate in the first place was CIA Chief George Tenet publicly saying that satellite images gave no indication the target was an embassy – “no flags, no seals, no clear markings” – when in fact all three were present.
One of his sources – a very senior Danish military figure – almost went on the record to confirm publicly that the bombing was intentional, he said. “Then he suddenly backed out and said if he uttered another word to me about this story that not only did he risk being fired but also prosecuted.”
Holsoe said it was clear at the time that there was military co-operation between Serb forces and the Chinese – and that he personally saw military vehicles entering and exiting the Chinese embassy. American officials told the New York Times that after the bombing they learned the embassy was China’s most significant intelligence collection platform in Europe.
“This was, and always will be, a murky story,” said Sweeney.
Ren Baokai survived and was later given the rank of general. He declined an interview with the BBC, saying he was now retired.
The Chinese ambassador who narrowly survived the strike, Pan Zhanlin, denied in a book that the embassy had been used for re-broadcasting and that China, in exchange, had been given parts of the US F-117 stealth fighter jet that Serbian forces had shot down in the early stages of the Nato campaign.
Getty Images
I think it’s complete nonsense – it was a bad map-reading error and a bad mistake.
It’s widely assumed that China did get hold of pieces of the plane to study its technology. It’s also been speculated that China was using the Nato air campaign to test technology to track stealth bombers that are normally undetectable.
But even if all these stories are true – the question remains: would the US really take the risk of bombing a Chinese embassy on purpose?
Even among ex-Yugoslav insiders there is no consensus. One former military intelligence officer told the BBC he believed the bombing was intentional and that the CIA’s explanation was ludicrous; while another, a retired colonel, said he believed America’s story.
“When something bad happens everybody thinks there has to be a secret reason – not a cock-up but a conspiracy,” said the former Nato spokesman Jamie Shea. “I think it’s complete nonsense – it was a bad map-reading error and a bad mistake.”
On a sunny day in late April, more than a dozen fresh bouquets were stacked up neatly against the memorial stone, but Shen Hong still felt compelled to re-arrange them. He comes to the site of the embassy bombing regularly, to remember his friends that died. But these days, it’s rare that he is alone.
Busloads of Chinese tourists arrive every day to gaze at the memorial and the statue of the Chinese sage and philosopher Confucius that now stands nearby.
A young Chinese couple, Zhang and He, were in Belgrade for their honeymoon and decided to visit the memorial. They are around the same age that Xu Xinghu and Zhu Ying were when they were killed in 1999. “Three of our countrymen died here. We knew about this since we were kids and we came to see it,” said He.
Yang, a guide who was leading some 30 middle-aged Chinese tourists on a two-week bus tour through the Balkans, said the embassy site was a mandatory stop. “Our embassy was destroyed by Americans. Every Chinese knows this.”
Image copyright LAZARA MARINKOVICImage caption The embassy site is being turned into one of the largest Chinese cultural centres in EuropeIn 1999, China was not the economic, technological and military giant it is now. It was focused on getting wealthy and had a much less visible foreign policy. But 20 years later the country knows it sits at the top table with America and its ambitions around the world reflect that.
The Belgrade embassy site is being turned into a Chinese cultural centre that will be one of the biggest in Europe. The symbolism is hard to miss: a site of national humiliation and tragedy at the hands of the West re-born as a shiny edifice to China’s glorious history.
It’s a sign that Beijing has no plans to forget a bombing that allows it to paint the US as an imperialist superpower looking to hurt China. Diplomats who have served in Beijing say the incident is still brought up regularly in conversations.
Image copyright LAZARA MARINKOVICBut even those who called for immediate retaliation in 1999 now realise it was fortunate that China’s reaction did not spiral out of control: no Americans were killed during the protests and the compensation agreement allowed Beijing to draw a line – if a thin one – under the incident.
“We were the fastest developing country, every year our economy grew by double-digits. And if we would have stopped that because of war back then, we would have lost a lot,” said Shen, as another group of tourists arrived at the memorial.
“By nature, I’m a radical. I am always more for war than for a conversation. But when I look back, they did a good thing. Because now we can sit equally with the Americans.”
Military exercises this week meant to foster image that Beijing can win a war over the island, analyst says
The PLA is staging live-fire drills at the northern end of the Taiwan Strait this week. Photo: AP
Beijing is conducting live-fire military drills at the northern end of the Taiwan Strait as it signals its resolve to thwart “pro-independence forces” in Taiwan.
Authorities in the small city of Yuhuan, Zhejiang province, notified the public on Sunday that a “no-sail zone” and “no-fishing zone” would be in effect in the area until Friday night.
It said the drills were part of the People’s Liberation Army’s “annual regular exercise plans” and would involve “actual use of weapons”.
“According to the annual [PLA’s] regular training plan … live-fire exercises involving the use of real weapons will be organised … in the designated areas from 6am on May 5 to 6pm on May 10,” the authorities said.
Collin Koh, a military analyst from the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University, said the stress on the live-fire manoeuvres suggested the six-day exercise would simulate real combat conditions.
The drills come hard on the heels of an annual report by the Pentagon warning that China was preparing options to unify Taiwan by force, and there was a need to deter, delay or deny any third-party intervention on Taiwan’s behalf.
Under the Taiwan Relations Act, the United States is bound by law to help defend the self-ruled island. Washington is Taipei’s main source of arms, selling the island more than US$15 billion in weaponry since 2010, according to the Pentagon.
Beijing ‘loses all hope for Taiwan’s Tsai Ing-wen’ as she rallies Washington
Taiwan is one of a growing number of flashpoints in the China-US relationship – along with a trade war, Beijing’s growing influence in emerging economies, and its stronger military posture in the South China Sea. On Monday, two guided-missile destroyers, USS Preble and USS Chung-Hoon passed within 12 nautical miles of Gaven and Johnson reefs in the Spratly Islands, drawing immediate criticism from Beijing.
In addition, Taiwan will hold its annual Han Kuang live-fire drills from May 27 to 31 and held a computer-aided one just last month.
A Taiwan affairs analyst from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences said the drills off Zhejiang were meant to show Beijing’s determination to defend its position on Taiwan.
“Beijing is trying to build up an image that China can win a war over Taiwan and Beijing’s key goal is to contain pro-independence forces, which are the biggest threat now to the peaceful unification process,” the analyst said.
Koh agreed, saying the drill sent a signal to external and domestic parties after the recent high-profile transits of US warships through the Taiwan Strait.
“The messaging to domestic audience is necessary because Beijing can’t be seen as weak following those reported transits by foreign warships – especially the Americans who are seen as supporting Taipei,” Koh said.
“And regarding external audience, the messaging is quite obviously to demonstrate that Beijing is ready to respond more resolutely to future such transits, following the tough verbal responses from Beijing, including its statement that it considers the strait under its jurisdiction and comprise its internal waters.”
Beijing ‘tones down’ response after US warships sail through Taiwan Strait
Relations between Beijing and Taipei have plunged since Tsai Ing-wen from the independence-leaning Democratic Progressive Party won the presidential election in 2016 and repeatedly refused to accept the “1992 consensus”, which Beijing says is the foundation for cross-strait dialogue.
In response, Beijing ramped up pressure against the island, including conducting more military exercises and establishing diplomatic ties with Taipei’s allies.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States accused China on Friday of putting well more than a million minority Muslims in “concentration camps,” in some of the strongest U.S. condemnation to date of what it calls Beijing’s mass detention of mostly Muslim Uighur minority and other Muslim groups.
The comments by Randall Schriver, who leads Asia policy at the U.S. Defense Department, are likely to increase tension with Beijing, which is sensitive to international criticism and describes the sites as vocational education training centres aimed at stemming the threat of Islamic extremism.
Former detainees have described to Reuters being tortured during interrogation at the camps, living in crowded cells and being subjected to a brutal daily regimen of party indoctrination that drove some people to suicide.
Some of the sprawling facilities are ringed with razor wire and watch towers.
“The (Chinese) Communist Party is using the security forces for mass imprisonment of Chinese Muslims in concentration camps,” Schriver told a Pentagon briefing during a broader discussion about China’s military, estimating that the number of detained Muslims could be “closer to 3 million citizens.”
Schriver, an assistant secretary of defence, defended his use of a term normally associated with Nazi Germany as appropriate, under the circumstances.
When asked by a reporter why he used the term, Schriver said that it was justified “given what we understand to be the magnitude of the detention, at least a million but likely closer to 3 million citizens out of a population of about 10 million.””So a very significant portion of the population, (given) what’s happening there, what the goals are of the Chinese government and their own public comments make that a very, I think, appropriate description,” he said.
The Chinese embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Thursday used the term re-education camps to describe the sites and said Chinese activity was “reminiscent of the 1930s.”
The U.S. government has weighed sanctions against senior Chinese officials in Xinjiang, a vast region bordering central Asia that is home to millions of Uighurs and other Muslim ethnic minorities. China has warned that it would retaliate “in proportion” against any U.S. sanctions.
The governor of Xinjiang in March directly dismissed comparisons to concentration camps, saying they were “the same as boarding schools.”
U.S. officials have said China has made criminal many aspects of religious practice and culture in Xinjiang, including punishment for teaching Muslim texts to children and bans on parents giving their children Uighur names.
Academics and journalists have documented grid-style police checkpoints across Xinjiang and mass DNA collection, and human rights advocates have decried martial law-type conditions there.
This combo photo shows Chinese Vice Premier Liu He, who is also a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and chief of the Chinese side of the China-U.S. comprehensive economic dialogue, posing for photos with U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. They held the tenth round of China-U.S. high-level economic and trade consultations in Beijing from April 30, 2019 to May 1, 2019. (Xinhua/Shen Hong, Zhai Jianlan)
BEIJING, May 1 (Xinhua) — Chinese Vice Premier Liu He, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin held the tenth round of China-U.S. high-level economic and trade consultations in Beijing from Tuesday to Wednesday.
As planned, the two sides will hold the 11th round of high-level economic and trade consultations in Washington D.C. next week.
Liu is also a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and chief of the Chinese side of the China-U.S. comprehensive economic dialogue.
Xi’s message talks of promoting ‘peaceful development’ as Reiwa era begins in Japan
Analysts see diplomacy as latest steps towards bringing an end to bitter rivalry
The Japanese flag flies at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on October to mark the visit of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to China. Photo: Kyodo
Chinese President Xi Jinping congratulated Emperor Naruhito on his ascent to the throne of Japan in an effort to strengthen China’s ties with its neighbour and competitor as Beijing’s trade dispute with the United States went on.
Xi sent greetings on Wednesday in which the president stressed the importance of relations between Beijing and Tokyo, China’s state-run Xinhua news agency reported.
The two countries should “work together to promote peaceful development and create a bright future for bilateral relations”, Xi said.
The president also sent a message to Akihito, now Japan’s emperor emeritus, and “expressed his greetings and wishes”, Xinhua said.
Akihito, 85, relinquished the throne to his son at midnight on Tuesday, bringing the Heisei era that spanned his 30-year reign to an end.
Naruhito took the Chrysanthemum Throne to begin the Reiwa era with a pledge to become a “symbol of unity”.
Xi’s message came as China and Japan tried to repair relations damaged by disputes over the East China Sea and the bitter legacy of the second world war.
Washington was locked in a trade tariff war with Beijing, and President Donald Trump’s America First policy had prompted fears about the US’ commitment to Asia at the highest levels of Japanese government. These have pushed Beijing and Tokyo closer and, in October, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe visited Beijing.
China set to appoint new ambassador to Japan, as Xi Jinping prepares for June visit
Xi was expected to attend a Group of 20 summit to be held in Osaka in June. A source said officials were considering whether Xi would dovetail a state visit to Japan with the summit.
Felix Wiebrecht, a China researcher at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said in the international environment China was more willing to put a deep-seated rivalry aside and take Japan as a partner.
“Facing increasing tensions with the US, China is naturally turning towards other potential opportunities for cooperation,” Wiebrecht said.
“Xi is indeed very likely to visit Japan this year since it seems that both he and Abe are interested in strengthening their cooperation. A visit this year could be seen as a culmination in normalising their relationship and comes at the right time for China as its conflict with the US intensifies”.
Ryo Hinata-Yamaguchi, a visiting professor at Pusan National University in South Korea and an adjunct fellow at the Pacific Forum foreign policy research institute, said Xi’s message could be seen as Beijing’s expectation on Tokyo to keep relations positive.
“[But] this would raise questions in Japan, particularly regarding regional and bilateral security issues, as well as the trade issues between the US and China,” he said.
As Japan prepares to mark end of an era, a look back at how China started the system
“The big question is whether China – as well as the US – expects Japan to work as some kind of mediator between Beijing and Washington, causing dilemmas for the Japanese government”.
Some observers remarked on the possibility of sideline meeting between the two leaders at Osaka.
“Xi could meet with Abe [at G20] in a bilateral context too,” Zhang Baohui director of the Centre for Asian Pacific Studies at Lingnan University in Hong Kong, said.
He also felt that Xi may make a separate state visit to Japan, after the G20 meeting closed.
“Japan is reportedly interested in having a second and separate visit by Xi later in the year … The Japanese efforts are part of a broader attempt by the Abe administration to improve relations with China,” Zhang said.
“A separate state visit would cement the full recovery of Sino-Japanese relations since the 2012 Diaoyu Islands dispute,” Zhang said.
Xi Jinping, then Chinese Vice-President, meets Emperor Akihito in Tokyo in December 2009. Photo: Xinhua
Japan and China both claim the territorial rights over the Senkaku Islands – also known as the Diaoyu Islands – in the East China Sea.
In 2012, Japanese government purchased three of the disputed islands from private owners, which prompted large-scale protests in China. In the following year, Beijing set up the East China Sea Air Defense Identification Zone which included the islands, requiring all aircraft entering the zone to file a flight plan, further intensifying the conflict between the two countries.
Efforts this summer to intensify diplomacy “should bring greater stability to the East China Sea and may even lead to greater Sino-Japanese cooperation on regional issues like economic integration”, Zhang said.
“But Japan’s concern for a rising China and China’s expanding maritime activities in the East China Sea will continue,” Zhang added, noting that Japan has also expanded its military capabilities in disputed areas such as the South China Sea.
Chinese President Xi Jinping and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe are likely to continue their diplomacy during and after June’s G20 summit in Osaka. Photo: EPA
Chinese President Xi Jinping (R) holds talks with Nepalese President Bidhya Devi Bhandari in Beijing, capital of China, April 29, 2019. (Xinhua/Huang Jingwen)
BEIJING, April 29 (Xinhua) — Chinese President Xi Jinping held talks with Nepalese President Bidhya Devi Bhandari in Beijing on Monday.
China highly values the development of bilateral relations, and supports Nepal’s efforts in safeguarding national independence, sovereign and territorial integrity, and in exploring a development path suited to Nepal’s own conditions, Xi said.
He expressed appreciation for Nepal’s long-time firm support on issues related to China’s core interests and major concerns, and Nepal’s active participation in the Belt and Road Initiative.
China and Nepal should strengthen cooperation in infrastructure construction, and continue to advance the construction of cross-border economic cooperation zone, Xi said, adding that China is willing to continue to support Nepal’s economic and social development.
Xi called on the two countries to intensify exchanges among legislative institutions, political parties, youth, think tanks and media, consolidate public support for China-Nepal friendship, and advance the friendly cooperative relations to a new level.
Bhandari said that China’s prosperity and stability present opportunities to Nepal, and her country is willing to deepen mutually beneficial cooperation with China in various fields.
She said that Nepal adheres to the one-China policy, and that Nepal will not allow any forces to engage in anti-China activities by using the territory of Nepal.
The two heads of state attended a ceremony for the signing of bilateral cooperation documents after the talks.
Beijing has retaliated with duties on $110bn worth of American products.
Tariffs on $200bn worth of Chinese goods were due to more than double at the start of the year, rising from 10% to 25%.
But both countries agreed to suspend tit-for-tat tariffs after they struck a truce in December, and began negotiations to work towards a deal.
US President Donald Trump recently said the US and China had agreed on “a lot of the most difficult points” but that “we have some ways to go”.
What are the sticking points?
Sticking points in negotiations in recent months have included how a deal would be enforced, issues around intellectual property protection, and how fast to roll back tariffs.
Gary Hufbauer from the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington said enforcement was a crucial issue, but remained optimistic about the prospect of a deal.
“China will make lots of promises, the US remains sceptical on implementation,” he said.
Still, he expects a deal to be announced by mid-May. The latest round of talks are expected to be followed by further negotiations in Washington on 8 May.
The US accuses China of stealing intellectual property and wants Beijing to make changes to its economic policies, which it says unfairly favour domestic companies through subsidies. It also wants China to buy more US goods to rein in a lofty trade deficit.
He said China would boost efforts to secure intellectual property protection, increase imports of goods and services and ensure a fair trading environment for firms.
But what makes trade negotiations particularly difficult to resolve is the fact they are part of a broader power struggle between the world’s two largest economies.
China’s growing influence has put many Western governments – and particularly the US on the defensive. Some in China see the trade war as part of US efforts to curb its rise.
The trade war is already having an impact on the world economy.
International Monetary Fund chief economist Gita Gopinath said the escalation of US-China trade tensions was one factor that had contributed to a “significantly weakened global expansion, especially in the second half of 2018.” The IMF cut its growth forecast for this year by 0.2 percentage points to 3.3%.
SINGAPORE (Reuters) – Some 20 million barrels of Iranian oil sitting on China’s shores in the northeast port of Dalian for the past six months now appears stranded as the United States hardens its stance on importing crude from Tehran.
Iran sent the oil to China, its biggest customer, ahead of the reintroduction of U.S. sanctions last November, as it looked for alternative storage for a backlog of crude at home.
The oil is being held in so-called bonded storage tanks at the port, which means it has yet to clear Chinese customs. Despite a six-month waiver to the start of May that allowed China to continue some Iranian imports, shipping data shows little of this oil has been moved.
Traders and refinery sources pointed to uncertainty over the terms of the waiver and said independent refiners had been unable to secure payment or insurance channels, while state refiners struggled to find vessels.
The future of the crude, worth well over $1 billion at current prices, has become even more unclear after Washington last week increased its pressure on Iran, saying it would end all sanction exemptions at the start of May.
“No responsible Chinese company with any international exposure will have anything to do with Iran oil unless they are specifically told by the Chinese government to do so,” said Tilak Doshi of oil and gas consultancy Muse, Stancil & Co in Singapore.
Iran previously stored oil in 2014 at Dalian during the last round of sanctions that was later sold to buyers in South Korea and India. reut.rs/2yo9Se6
China last week formally complained to the United States over the unilateral Iran sanctions, but U.S. officials have said Washington is not considering a further short-term waiver or a wind-down period.
The 20 million barrels is equal to about a month’s worth of China’s imports from Iran over the past six months, or about two days of the country’s total imports.
Iran says it will continue to export oil in defiance of U.S. sanctions.
A senior official with the National Iranian Tanker Company (NITC), who spoke on condition of anonymity, told Reuters: “We will continue to sell our oil.”
“Iran is now desperate and will deal with anyone with steep discounts as long as they get paid somehow,” said Doshi.
SOME OIL TAKEN
Some Iranian oil sent to Dalian has moved, according to a ship tracking analyst at Refinitiv.
Dan, a supertanker owned by NITC moved 2 million barrels of oil from Dalian more than 1,000 km (620 miles) to the south to the Ningbo Shi Hua crude oil terminal in March, according to Refinitiv data.
Ningbo is home to Sinopec’s Zhenhai refinery, one of the country’s largest oil plants with a capacity of 500,000 barrels a day and a top processor of Iranian oil.
Sinopec declined to comment.
The Iranian tanker was chartered by state-run Chinese trader Zhuhai Zhenrong Corp, according to Refinitiv analyst Emma Li. The NITC official confirmed the oil was taken by Zhuhai Zhenrong.
Zhenrong was started in the 1990s and brokered the first oil supply deals between Iran and China. At that time, Iran was supplying oil to China to pay for arms supplied by Beijing during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war. Zhuhai Zhenrong still specializes mainly in buying Iranian oil.(reut.rs/2IHlvEx)
An official at the general manager’s office with Zhuhai Zhenrong’s office in Beijing said he could not immediately comment. The company did not reply to a fax seeking comment.
For now, more Iranian oil is heading to China, with the supertankers Stream and Dream II due to arrive in eastern China from Iran on May 5 and May 7, respectively, Refinitiv data showed.
Some of this crude may be from Chinese investments into Iranian oilfields, a sanctions grey area.
Whether China will keep buying oil from Iran remains unclear, but analysts at Fitch Solutions said in a note “there may be scope for imports via barter or non-compliance from … China.”
Muse, Stancil & Co’s Doshi said the only way to get the Iranian oil out of Dalian now was by cheating.
“Only rogue parties might try to cheat the system and try to pass the Iranian oil at Dalian as something else via fraudulent docs. But I doubt this is easy or can amount to much in terms of volume.”
(MAP: Iranian supertanker frees some oil from China storage in March, tmsnrt.rs/2W1FJvK)
BEIJING, April 28 (Xinhua) — China will hold a gathering to mark the centenary of the May Fourth Movement at 10:30 a.m. on Tuesday at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing.
President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, will attend the event and deliver an important speech.
The event will be broadcast live by China Media Group and on http://www.xinhuanet.com. It will also be rebroadcast simultaneously on major news websites including people.com.cn, cctv.com and china.com.cn as well as on news apps run by People’s Daily, Xinhua News Agency and China Central Television.
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