US, China draw red lines over Taiwan
Defense chiefs butt heads, compare notes, understandings reached in Biden-Xi meeting.
US Secretary of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin met with China Minister of National Defense General Wei Fenghe on the sidelines of the ASEAN defense ministerial in Cambodia on Tuesday.
The two discussed “defense relations and regional and global security issues” and Secretary Austin “emphasized the need to responsibly manage competition and maintain open lines of communication,” according to a readout of the meeting from the Pentagon.
Austin raised US concerns about “increasingly dangerous behavior” of Chinese military aircraft over the Pacific and told Wei the US military would continue to operate in international waters and airspace.
Austin “underscored” US opposition to any attempt by China to coerce Taiwan into reunification and urged Wei’s government to “refrain from further destabilizing actions toward Taiwan,” the Pentagon said.
Wei told Austin that Beijing views the Taiwan question as a core national interest and “the first insurmountable red line in China-US relations,” according to a report of the meeting by the state-owned China News Service.
Taiwan is China's Taiwan, and the settlement of the Taiwan question is the Chinese people's own affair and brooks no foreign interference, Wei told Austin according to the report.
Further, Wei said the Chinese military has the backbone, confidence, and ability to resolutely safeguard national unification.
COVID resurgence
COVID infections continue to rise in China as Beijing battles an outbreak in its central business and diplomatic district.
Three elderly people died over the weekend at Beijing’s Ditan hospital, and the daily average of new cases doubled last week to 22,200, the China News Service reported.
“Beijing is at the most critical and toughest moment of fighting COVID-19,” Liu Xiaofeng, deputy director of the Beijing CDC, said at a press conference on Monday.
The rise in infections in several major cities puts into doubt the prospect of China easing its zero-COVID policy and likely signals a continuing slowdown of its economy, according to The Associated Press.
Investors sold China-related stocks; the global price of oil dipped on Monday. “Concerns over China are continuing to drive the markets,” Fawad Razaqzada, a market analyst at FOREX.com said in a post online.
Xinjiang cotton
Shein, a Chinese fast-fashion retailer, is shipping clothing direct to US consumers that contains banned cotton from Xinjiang, according to Bloomberg.
Laboratory testing conducted for Bloomberg this year found that garments shipped to the US by Shein were made with cotton from Xinjiang, which Congress restricted late last year. China’s government has placed more than 1 million Uyghurs into forced-labor camps in Xinjiang.
“The results bring new urgency to concerns about the retailer, which stars in endless TikTok “haul” videos with young customers showing off their purchases,” Bloomberg reported.
How China spies
Anthony Holmes, a former North Korea advisor at the Pentagon during in the Trump administration, authored a report on the US website 19fortyfive.com detailing how Chinese operatives solicit information from US national security professionals using LinkedIn “as an approach vector.”
He also reviews findings of the 2020 scholarly work Chinese Espionage: Operations and Tactics by Nicholas Eftimiades, a retired US intelligence officer now teaching at Penn State University.
Holmes says he’s been repeatedly approached to write articles for phantom journals on key issues such as US views on relations with China over Taiwan.
Another recent book Holmes does not mention but which is getting attention is, Spies and Lies: How China’s Greatest Covert Operations Fooled the World. Published in May by Australian analyst Alex Joske, it delves into classified Chinese documents and interviews with defectors to uncover the Chinese influence operations in the West.