China Defense

In the last two months, the Pentagon has moved quietly but rapidly to develop military ties with the Chinese People's Liberation Army, raising questions in the United States and among Asian governments about what the new relationship means and where it is headed. Two months ago, in a private ceremony, a top Chinese general received the same sort of honor cordon at the Pentagon that Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide recently received on nationwide television. Last month, Gen. Merrill A.

In a message clearly aimed at China, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said today that fast-growing Asian powers "risk blundering" into confrontation and sparking a new arms race unless they follow widely accepted international rules. Gates said the U.S. supported the rapid economic growth of emerging Asian nations.

A 1988 Chinese military document obtained by the CIA in 1995 describes the weight, dimensions, explosive yield and other significant details of six U.S. nuclear warheads and the ballistic missiles that carry them, as well as hand-drawn sketches of the reentry vehicles that house the warheads, U.S. officials said Monday.

Re Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's warning about the growing Chinese military budget, June 4: I felt that it could be used to define our own explanation for our own military actions. Rumsfeld's comment that "since no nation threatens China, one must wonder why this growing investment." The hypocrisy inherent in this statement can be mirrored in our own use of Iraq as an excuse to exert our own military might. China has as much to fear from Taiwan as we had to fear from Iraq. The bottom line is that powerful nations do as they wish for their own gains and use any convenient excuse to justify their decisions.

Atty. Gen. Janet Reno defended the Justice Department's refusal to let the FBI search the computer of a suspected nuclear weapon lab spy in 1997 as "a close call" justified by a lack of evidence. Reno's defense in a meeting of the Senate Intelligence Committee left Republicans and Democrats angry over the slow response by Justice and the FBI to an espionage crisis.

Maintaining heavy government spending, China will attempt to double the size of its economy by the end of the decade, Premier Zhu Rongji told the annual session of China's legislature Monday. Zhu's forecast was part of Beijing's 10th five-year economic and social plan, a format held over from China's command economy. The plan was submitted for the approval of the National People's Congress.

Senior Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping formally stepped down Wednesday as head of the state Central Military Commission, taking another step to help Communist Party General Secretary Jiang Zemin consolidate power as his designated successor. Deng's resignation, formally accepted Wednesday by the National People's Congress, had been expected since last November, when he stepped down from the more powerful post of head of the Communist Party's Central Military Commission.

Restoration of peace in Afghanistan should return the question of control of nuclear weapons to the top of U.S. policy objectives in South Asia, a Senate Foreign Relations Committee aide said in a report released Sunday. For more than a quarter century, Washington sought, with only limited success, to halt the development of nuclear arms by India and Pakistan, the report said. But in the 1980s, the Afghanistan conflict increasingly dominated U.S.

China opened an international exhibit of its arsenal in Beijing. The China Precision Machinery Import and Export Corp., one of the country's largest arms manufacturers, said it is putting six new missiles on the market during the four-day Asian Defense Technology Exposition. They include several medium-range coastal defense missiles intended to replace the Silkworm, which Chinese officials said uses outdated technology and is being phased out.

China will boost its military modernization program through higher government spending on defense this year, Finance Minister Liu Zhongli announced Tuesday. The 1993 defense budget will jump 14.7%, Liu said in a report to China's rubber-stamp Parliament, the National People's Congress. After adjustment for inflation, that would be an increase of about 8.2% in real terms, bringing officially acknowledged defense spending to $7.4 billion.

Maintaining heavy government spending, China will attempt to double the size of its economy by the end of the decade, Premier Zhu Rongji told the annual session of China's legislature Monday. Zhu's forecast was part of Beijing's 10th five-year economic and social plan, a format held over from China's command economy. The plan was submitted for the approval of the National People's Congress.

China's top defense official declared Wednesday that Beijing reserves the right to use military force against Taiwan to resolve their half-century dispute but has "no intent" to do so, U.S. officials here said. In a closed-door meeting, Chinese Gen. Chi Haotian assured visiting U.S. Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen that Beijing's emphasis remains on a peaceful reconciliation across the Taiwan Strait, said a senior U.S. official here who spoke only on condition of anonymity.

At one level, the arrival of China's first Russian-built guided-missile destroyer in East Asian waters in recent days is a troubling reminder of the budding military relationship between two nuclear giants increasingly wary of U.S. intentions. The $500-million Sovremenny-class destroyer and its sophisticated anti-ship missiles, which passed through the Taiwan Strait on Friday, provide a new dimension to China's modest navy: the ability to confront U.S. aircraft carriers.

Amid U.S. allegations of espionage and during increased tensions with Taiwan--including stepped-up air maneuvers over the Taiwan Strait--China announced that it successfully conducted a test launch Monday of a new type of long-range missile. A terse statement by the official New China News Agency confirmed the test-firing of the ground-to-ground missile within Chinese territory, but it gave no further details. The Ministry of National Defense declined to comment.

China is expected to flight-test a new intermediate-range ballistic missile this year that ultimately will target Russia and India but not the continental United States, U.S. officials said Friday. The so-called DF-31, which has been in development for nearly two decades, would be China's first solid-fueled, truck-mounted missile and the first ballistic missile design Beijing has introduced since the early 1980s.

Atty. Gen. Janet Reno defended the Justice Department's refusal to let the FBI search the computer of a suspected nuclear weapon lab spy in 1997 as "a close call" justified by a lack of evidence. Reno's defense in a meeting of the Senate Intelligence Committee left Republicans and Democrats angry over the slow response by Justice and the FBI to an espionage crisis.

Here in China's old southern capital, 100,000 extras gathered to be part of a film, released today, re-creating the 1937 Rape of Nanking by Japanese invaders. Hundreds of people lay on the ground all day portraying bayoneted corpses; several dozen of them were more than 80 years old, survivors of the original massacre of nearly 300,000 by Japanese invaders in this city now known as Nanjing.

Sometime in the next month a team of Pentagon officials will travel to Beijing to give a "detailed briefing" to Chinese military officers about the U.S. defense budget and overall strategic goals. In exchange, said U.S. Secretary of Defense William J. Perry at a news conference Tuesday in Beijing, the U.S. government has invited Chinese defense officials to Washington to deliver reciprocal briefings about the budget, policy and strategy of the People's Liberation Army.

A 1988 Chinese military document obtained by the CIA in 1995 describes the weight, dimensions, explosive yield and other significant details of six U.S. nuclear warheads and the ballistic missiles that carry them, as well as hand-drawn sketches of the reentry vehicles that house the warheads, U.S. officials said Monday.

China's strategic nuclear strike force remains small, antiquated and highly vulnerable to attack, despite lurid headlines and frightening reports warning that Beijing has acquired crucial nuclear weapon secrets and advanced missile technology from the United States. But U.S.