A U.S. spy plane conducting a routine patrol over international waters in the East China Sea on Tuesday was intercepted by two Chinese fighter jets.
U.S. military officials in the Pacific told Reuters that one of the Chinese planes came within “an unsafe excessive rate of closure” to the U.S. aircraft, but blamed the incident on “improper airmanship, as no other provocative or unsafe maneuvers occurred.”
The altercation underscores the geopolitical power struggle in maritime Asia between the U.S. and China. Beijing has claimed most of the contested reefs, rocks and islets of the South China Sea as its own territory. But Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Taiwan and Brunei have competing claims to various parts of the region.
Beijing responded to the incident by accusing Washington of “deliberately hyping up the issue of the close surveillance of China by U.S. military aircraft,” according to a statement quoted by Reuters.
The 50th anniversary of the start of the Cultural Revolution, which plunged China into a decade of chaos, has been met with silence in state media.
On 16 May 1966 Communist leader Mao Zedong began a campaign to eliminate his rivals. At the same time he called on Chinese youth to “purge” society.
Years of bloodshed and turmoil ensued, ending with Mao’s death in 1976.
How to handle the era’s contentious legacy has remained a challenge to China’s Communist rulers to this day.
On Monday, the main state media outlets made virtually no mention of the anniversary, focusing on coverage of the South China Sea and other domestic issues. No official events were planned by the authorities to mark the 50-year milestone.
The man she calls Uncle Li belongs to China’s army of family planning officers. Stationed in every city, town and village in China, for the past 35 years their job has been to hunt down families suspected of violating the country’s draconian rules on how many children couples can have.
But with the end of the one-child policy at the beginning of this year, some, like Li Bo, are being retrained for a different role. Now he could even be mistaken for a Chinese Father Christmas visiting remote villages in the mountains of Shaanxi province with a bag full of toys and picture books.
Along with 68 of his colleagues, Li is part of a pilot programme involving academics from Shaanxi Normal University and Stanford University’s Rural Education Action Programme. His new job is to teach parents and grandparents how to develop toddlers’ minds by talking, singing and reading to them.
(CNN)China has denied a U.S. aircraft carrier entry into a Hong Kong port, according to Pentagon spokesman Cmdr. Bill Urban.
“We were recently informed that a request for a port visit by a U.S. carrier strike group, including the USS John C. Stennis and accompanying vessels, to Hong Kong was denied,” he said. “We have a long track record of successful port visits to Hong Kong, including with the current visit of the (command ship) USS Blue Ridge, and we expect that will continue.”
It was not immediately clear why the Stennis was denied port access.
A spokesman for the Hong Kong Security Bureau declined to comment on the decision, saying the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government wouldn’t comment on the individual visit application of foreign warships.
The port access denial comes just two weeks after Defense Secretary Ash Carter visited the Stennis while the carrier was operating in the South China Sea. The area is at the center of heightened tensions between the United States and China, with Beijing building and militarizing man-made islands in the contested waters.
By building air bases and hardened bunkers on tiny islands, some of which are reclaimed from the sea, and by installing sophisticated radar and missile defense systems, China has shown it is determined to achieve military primacy in the region, Admiral Harry Harris said.
Beijing’s claims to almost all of the South China Sea are widely disputed and the body of water has long been viewed as a potential flashpoint.
“If China continues to arm all of the bases they have reclaimed in the South China Sea, they will change the operational landscape in the region,” Harris told Pentagon reporters.
“Short of war with the United States, China will exercise de facto control of the South China Sea.”
Taiwan’s Defense Ministry said the missile batteries had been set up on Woody Island in the Paracels chain, which has been under Chinese control for decades but also is claimed by Taiwan and Vietnam.
A U.S. defense official also confirmed the “apparent deployment” of the missiles, first reported by Fox News.
“There is every evidence, every day that there has been an increase of militarization of one kind or another,” Kerry told reporters when asked about the reported deployment. “It’s of serious concern.
“We have had these conversations with the Chinese and I am confident that over the next days we will have further very serious conversation on this.”
Kerry was in Cambodia after a visit to neighboring Laos as part of an effort to urge unity among leaders of the 10-nation Association of Southeast Asian Nations before a summit with President Barack Obama in Sunnylands, California, next month.
In Phnom Penh, Kerry met Hun Sen, Asia’s longest serving prime minister, and Foreign Minister Hor Namhong for what Kerry described as “candid and constructive” meetings.
Hor Namhong said Cambodia’s position on the South China Sea was unchanged. It believed individual countries should settle disputes among themselves without the involvement of ASEAN, he said.
Realizing that the Middle East is too important to be left to others — and that neglecting it could run to China’s peril — China is no longer willing to sit on the sidelines and watch the region descend into chaos. China has for several months harbored a suspicion that the United States, entering an election year while drowning in domestic oil and gas supply, is not as interested in the Middle East as it has been for the past half century. (At any rate, Washington’s relations with Riyadh and Tehran are too thorny to enable it to be an honest broker.) More importantly, Russia has laid down the flag of Middle East neutrality that it carried for most of the post-Soviet era. Moscow once enjoyed equally good relations with Tehran and Riyadh. But in plunging into the civil war in Syria, Russia — despite the fact that most of its Muslim population is Sunni — entangled itself with the Shiite camp, and can no longer be trusted by the Sunnis. With the United States and Russia no longer able to hold the balance between Iran and Saudi Arabia, China, which has solid relations with both, is increasingly tempted to fill the vacuum.
China’s economy grew by 6.9% in 2015, marking its slowest growth in 25 years.
While a concern for the global economy, this is also a symptom of a maturing national economy in China. It’s easy to put up double-digit growth numbers when you are starting from almost nothing.
Washington (AFP) – A US Hellfire missile has turned up in Cuba after going missing in a fiasco that has left American officials worried the technology may be shared with China, Russia or North Korea, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Though the missile was not carrying a warhead, the alarming diversion while it was in transit from Europe has spurred US investigators to probe whether its arrival on the communist island was the result of criminal activity or merely a series of mistakes, according to the newspaper.
And despite a historic thaw in ties with Cuba over the past year, Washington has been unsuccessful in its push to get the missile back, the WSJ said, citing unnamed sources.
It reported that American officials were not concerned that Cuba would take apart the Hellfire — an air-to-ground missile often carried by helicopters — but were worried that Havana would share the technology with US rivals China and Russia, as well as North Korea.
After increasing for six years (except from 2012- 2013), a majority of respondents this year—53%— reported difficulties in recruiting senior executives to work in China due to air quality issues.
The one child policy didn’t seem to be slowing their population growth anyway.
(CNN)China will allow two children for every couple, China’s state-run Xinhua news agency reported Thursday, a move that would effectively dismantle the remnants of the country’s one-child policy that had been eased in recent years.
“To promote a balanced growth of population, China will continue to uphold the basic national policy of population control and improve its strategy on population development,” Xinhua reported, citing a communique issued by the ruling Communist Party. “China will fully implement the policy of ‘one couple, two children’ in a proactive response to the issue of an aging population.”
By 2017, tourists can expect to do their business in modernized “three-star” bathrooms, says the tourism office.
Currently, traditional public restrooms across China are squat toilets — or put simply, holes in the ground — and BYOTP, ‘Bring Your Own Toilet Paper.’
According to the World Toilet Summit, an international event committed to improving toilet and sanitation conditions worldwide, clean restrooms are one of the keys to boosting tourism.
There’s a lot to learn from an article that just appeared on the website of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army; for example, Chinese soldiers’ underpants were equipped with elasticated waistbands only in the 21st century.
Until recently, the article recalls, an infantryman would “have to worry about the rope of his big underpants, which would loosen suddenly but could never be untied when he wanted to answer the call of nature.”
China wagged its finger at the student protesters, and warned against any foreign interference as they massed again in business and tourist districts of the city in the late afternoon.
“Hong Kong is China’s Hong Kong,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying defiantly told a news briefing in Beijing.
The unrest, the worst in Hong Kong since China resumed its rule over the former British colony in 1997, sent white clouds of gas wafting among some of the world’s most valuable office towers and shopping malls before riot police suddenly withdrew around lunchtime on Monday, after three nights of confrontation.
