Tag: East Asia

TAIPEI, Taiwan —  Former Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou is visiting China to help build social and cultural links on a trip that might include a meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping despite heightened tensions. Ma left Taipei with a student group Monday on an 11-day trip that underlines continued interactions in education, business and culture despite Beijing’s threat to use military force against the self-governing island democracy to achieve unification. Toward the end of his second term in 2015, Ma held a historic meeting with Xi in Singapore, which has…

Chinese President Xi Jinping praised China’s strong ties with Indonesia during a meeting Monday with President-elect Prabowo Subianto. Xi laid plans for regional peace and affirmed China’s commitment to deepen maritime cooperation with Indonesia. State broadcaster CCTV reported that Xi told Prabowo that bilateral ties “have entered a new stage of jointly building a community with a shared future.” He also added that China “is willing to deepen all-round strategic cooperation with Indonesia” to build a community between the two countries with a strong regional and global influence. Prabowo was…

washington —  Vietnam is crying foul over a Chinese bid to redefine its coastal waters in the Gulf of Tonkin, a waterway at the northern end of the South China Sea lying between China’s Hainan Island and Vietnam. Beijing’s delineation of a new baseline in the gulf was declared earlier this month. Under the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), a country’s baseline is essentially its shoreline at low tide and is used to determine the extent of coastal waters and exclusive economic zones. The convention makes…

Tokyo —  Japan said Sunday its experts have held talks with their Chinese counterparts to try to assuage Beijing’s concerns over the discharge of treated radioactive wastewater from the wrecked Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant into the sea. The discharges have been opposed by fishing groups and neighboring countries especially China, which banned all imports of Japanese seafood. China’s move has largely affected Japanese scallop growers and exporters to China. During the talks held Saturday in the northeastern Chinese city of Dalian, Japanese officials provided “science-based” explanation of how the…

Taipei, Taiwan —  China’s Ministry of State Security issued a fresh warning this week about overseas spy agencies and what it says are their efforts in recent years to obtain state secrets under the disguise of consulting agencies. The six-minute video released Thursday on the ministry’s official WeChat social media account reenacts what it says was a real case where overseas spy agencies instructed a consulting firm to steal classified information from a Chinese company seeking to invest abroad. The release of the video comes as Chinese leader Xi Jinping…

Passersby in Beijing during winter or early spring might happen upon groups of residents playing fetch with birds. The players blow plastic beads into the air through carbon tubes for the birds — often from the migratory wutong species — to catch and return, in exchange for a treat. It’s a Beijing tradition dating back to the Qing Dynasty, which ruled between the 17th century and early 20th century. Today, only about 50 to 60 people in Beijing are believed to still practice it. Voice of America

MANILA, Philippines —  Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has ordered his government to strengthen its coordination on maritime security to confront “a range of serious challenges” to territorial integrity and peace, as a dispute with China escalates. The order, signed on Monday and made public on Sunday, does not mention China but follows a series of bilateral maritime confrontations and mutual accusations over a disputed area of the South China Sea. Beijing claims almost all of the South China Sea, a conduit for more than $3 trillion of annual ship-borne…

ISLAMABAD —  China joined a Pakistan probe Friday into the killing of five of its nationals in a suicide car bombing. That attack has led to the suspension of work on a multibillion-dollar Chinese-funded hydropower project. Pakistani Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi’s office said that he met with a “special investigation team from China” at Beijing’s embassy in Islamabad and “briefed them on the investigation so far” into Tuesday’s deadly attack. According to a statement, they also discussed efforts to enhance the security of Chinese nationals in Pakistan during the meeting.…