Archive for the ‘China’ tag
N Korea Resumes Korean War
North Korea announced Wednesday that it is no longer bound by the 1953 armistice that halted the Korean War, the latest and most profound diplomatic aftershock from the country’s latest nuclear test two days earlier.
The Korean War ended in an armistice, rather than in a capitulation. That armistice agreement means that the Korean War never actually ended and fifty-six years later, Pyongyang has just said its back on.
North Korea also warned that it would respond “with a powerful military strike” should its ships be stopped by international forces trying to stop the export of missiles and weapons of mass destruction.
The twin declarations, delivered by the country’s state news agency, followed South Korea’s announcement Tuesday that it would join the navies that will stop and inspect suspicious ships at sea. North Korea has repeatedly said that such participation would be a “declaration of war.”
They followed other developments in North Korea that have added to the sense of jangled nerves across northeast Asia since Monday’s underground nuclear test.
The North fired three more short-range missiles off its east coast on Tuesday, said Yonhap, the South Korean news agency. North Korea had fired two missiles into the same waters on Monday.
And U.S. spy satellites have detected signs that North Korea has restarted its nuclear plant, a South Korean newspaper reported Wednesday. Chosun Ilbo cited an unnamed South Korean government source as saying that steam has been detected from a reprocessing facility at North Korea’s Yongbyon plant.
In Washington, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton spoke Tuesday to her Russian counterpart as part of an effort to seek a united response with “consequences” for North Korea. But U.S. officials also stressed that they are still eager for North Korea to return to multilateral disarmament talks and are not ready to declare the multi-year effort to end North Korea’s nuclear program a failure.
“We feel the door does still remain open, that we’re ready to engage,” said State Department spokesman Ian Kelly. He described the Obama administration’s effort now as trying to “bring international pressure to bear to get them to reverse their course.”
In Tokyo, a former defense minister and ruling party lawmaker said Japan should consider developing the ability to conduct preemptive strikes against North Korea, even though Japan’s constitution prohibits it from taking offensive military action.
South Korea had long resisted U.S. pressure to join the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI), which was created in 2003 by President George W. Bush and includes more than 90 countries that have agreed to stop and inspect suspicious cargo on sea and land.
Seoul was reluctant to rile North Korea, but North Korea’s second nuclear test nudged Seoul Korea to change its policy.
North Korea has long been suspected of shipping or flying missiles to customers in the Middle East and South Asia.
China, Brazil, To Dump US Dollar
Brazil and China will work towards using their own currencies in trade transactions rather than the US dollar, according to Brazil’s central bank and aides to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s president.
The move follows recent Chinese challenges to the status of the dollar as the world’s leading international currency.
Mr Lula da Silva, who is visiting Beijing this week, and Hu Jintao, China’s president, first discussed the idea of replacing the dollar with the renminbi and the real as trade currencies when they met at the G20 summit in London last month.
An official at Brazil’s central bank stressed that talks were at an early stage. He also said that what was under discussion was not a currency swap of the kind China recently agreed with Argentina and which the US had agreed with several countries, including Brazil.
“Currency swaps are not necessarily trade related,” the official said. “The funds can be drawn down for any use. What we are talking about now is Brazil paying for Chinese goods with reals and China paying for Brazilian goods with renminbi.”
More from Financial Times
China Plays High Seas Game of Chicken
Chinese vessels “shadowed and aggressively maneuvered in dangerously close proximity” to the USNS Impeccable, an unarmed ocean surveillance vessel, with one ship coming within 25 feet, a U.S. Defense Department statement said.
At one point during the incident Sunday the unarmed USNS Impeccable turned fire hoses on an approaching Chinese ship in self defense, the Pentagon said. At another point a Chinese ship played chicken with the Americans, stopping dead in front of the Impeccable as it tried to sail away, forcing the civilian mariners to slam on the brakes.
Tropical Hainan, less than 100 km 60 miles south of the mainland, hosts a Chinese naval base that houses ballistic missile submarines, according to independent analysts.
An unnamed spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Washington earlier denied the Chinese ships had violated maritime rules and said U.S. ships had been conducting illegal surveying, the website of Hong Kong-based Phoenix Television news.ifeng.com reported.
It said the incident happened 120 km 70 miles south of the island.
CIA Warns: China Could Become Adversarial
China’s rise is posing serious challenges and its military buildup and international behavior could produce an “adversarial” relationship with the world, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden said last week.
“After two centuries of perceived Western hegemony, China seems to be determined to flex its muscles,” Hayden said.
China and India will affect strategic planning, he said. “Competition for influence will characterize the relationships between China, India, Japan and other emerging powers,” Hayden said during a speech at Kansas State University.
“But China, a communist-led nuclear state that aspires to and will likely achieve great power status during this century, will be the focus of American attention in that region of the world.”
Hayden said there are differing views about China’s rise and its motivations. His view is that China is an economic competitor and increasingly becoming a “geopolitical” competitor.
“But China is not an inevitable enemy of the United States of America. There are good policy choices available to both Washington and Beijing that can keep us on the largely peaceful, constructive path that we’ve both been on now for about 40 years,” he said.
China’s military buildup is the most significant aspect of Beijing’s growth, Hayden said, noting that the PLA has integrated the U.S. conflict lessons learned in both Persian Gulf wars. “They’ve developed an integrated advanced weaponry into a modern military force,” he said.
The new Chinese military power could pose a risk to U.S. forces and interest in the region, and the military buildup is also about projecting the image of strength, he said.
“It sees an advanced military force as an essential element of great power status, and it is the intelligence community’s view that any Chinese government, even a democratic one, would have similar nationalist goals.”
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