Plea to Japan over WWII chemicals
Print Edition
CHINA’S top general yesterday urged Japan to speed up the disposal of leftover World War II chemical weapons, the day before President Barack Obama is to visit a Japanese city destroyed by a US nuclear bomb to end the war.
General Fan Changlong was visiting the Haerbaling site in northeast China’s Jilin Province, where an estimated 330,000 chemical bombs were buried by Japanese troops at the end of the war.
Fan “emphasized the need to urge Japan to earnestly meet its treaty obligations, boost investment, accelerate the pace of destruction work and at an early date return pure earth to the Chinese people,” the defense ministry quoted him as saying.
At a monthly news conference, ministry spokesman Colonel Yang Yujun said Fan’s visit was unrelated to Obama’s trip to Hiroshima. Yang said Fan, who ranks just below President Xi Jinping on the Central Military Commission that controls the armed forces, hoped his visit would emphasize the importance of the work being carried out at Haerbaling.
China says it has discovered abandoned chemical weapons at 90 sites, Haerbaling being the biggest. The joint cleanup there is projected to be complete in 2022.
Turning to what the US claimed was an unsafe intercept over the South China Sea last week, Yang said the two Chinese fighter jets involved had followed the rules when they approached a US military reconnaissance aircraft.
The Pentagon said the incident took place in international airspace as the plane carried out “a routine US patrol.”
A US defense official said two J-11 jets flew within 15 meters of the US EP-3 aircraft. The official said the incident took place east of Hainan Island.
Yang said China’s aircraft had acted completely professionally and in line with an agreement reached between the countries on rules governing such encounters. However, he said the agreement, called the Rules of Behavior for Safety of Air and Maritime Encounters, could only provide a “technical standard,” and the best way of resolving the problem was for the US to stop such flights.
“That’s the real source of danger for Sino-US military safety at sea and in the air,” he said.
The encounter came shortly after China scrambled fighter jets after a US Navy ship sailed close to a Chinese reef in the South China Sea.
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