Rumsfeld challenges China over military build-up
US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld issued a blunt challenge to China at a regional security conference, saying Beijing must provide more political freedom to its citizens, and questioned its recent military build-up.
Rumsfeld said the Pentagon’s annual assessment of China’s military capabilities showed China was spending more than its leaders acknowledged, expanding its missile capabilities and developing advanced military technology. China now had the world’s third-largest military budget, Rumsfeld said, behind the US and Russia.
“One might be concerned that this build-up is putting the delicate military balance in the region at risk – especially, but not only, with respect to Taiwan,” Rumsfeld said in a keynote speech at the conference in Singapore, organised by the International Institute of Strategic Studies. “Since no nation threatens China, one wonders: why this growing investment?”
The speech was a direct verbal confrontation to China, given that Beijing sent representatives to the annual conference this year after skipping last year’s event. Officials from Taiwan, a self-governing island which China regards as a renegade territory, were not invited to this year’s event.
China has said it will attack Taiwan if the island tries to declare independence and repeatedly calls on the United States to stop selling weapons to Taiwan. Beijing denounced a joint US-Japan statement earlier this year saying the two allies shared the objective of a peaceful resolution of the Taiwan issue.
The US is urging the European Union to keep in place its ban on selling weapons to China.
Washington argues that any European weapons sold to China could be used in a conflict over Taiwan.
Rumsfeld also questioned China’s government, saying political freedom there had not kept pace with increasing economic freedom.
“Ultimately, China will need to embrace some form of open, representative government if it is to fully achieve the benefits to which its people aspire,” he said.
The speech, prepared nearly a day in advance, was the strongest criticism Rumsfeld levelled at China since he took the helm at the Pentagon in 2001.
The previous low point was in April 2001, when a US surveillance plane and a Chinese fighter jet collided in mid-air, forcing the American plane to land in China. The crew of the Navy plane was released 11 days later.
But the defence secretary had even harsher words for North Korea, quoting a European doctor who called the reclusive communist country “a living hell” for all but its elite.
North Korea, Rumsfeld said, was a country where “the children and grandchildren of dissidents are pressed into heavy labour; refugees who escape are kidnapped from other countries and returned to torment; and where the regime builds more and more weapons – while starving citizens search barren fields for individual grains and many are without clean water”.
Similar US criticism of North Korea has received an angry response from Pyongyang, which justifies its nuclear programmes by saying Washington has a “hostile policy” against it. The state-run Korea Central News Agency this week called vice president Dick Cheney a “bloodthirsty beast” for saying that North Korean leader Kim Jong Il was irresponsible.
President Bush and other administration officials say the US has no intention of attacking North Korea.
