Far East Watch
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BEIJING — The Philippines defense secretary and his family have been banned from entering China over comments he has made about Beijing’s claims in the South China Sea, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Thursday.
Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro and his wife and kids are banned from entering China, including Hong Kong, while individuals and groups in China are also banned from having any sort of transaction with Teodoro, the ministry said in a statement
Teodoro is known for using strong language to counter China’s claims over the strategic waters, calling them a “fiction and lie” that no Southeast Asian country would accept.
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Taiwan may feel distant to most Europeans, but a Chinese takeover of the island would send shockwaves from Washington to Tokyo, Taiwan’s deputy foreign minister François Chih-chung Wu told Euronews Next.
“If China attacks Taiwan, France, Europe, the United States, and Japan will all be affected. Taiwan will be in a terrible situation — but so will you,” he warned.
The deputy minister pushed back on China’s claim over Taiwan as part of its territory since the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949. Beijing has never ruled out using force to bring the self-governing island under its control and refuses to recognise it as a sovereign state, insisting it be referred to internationally as “Chinese Taipei,” a designation that reflects China’s position that there is only “one China” and that Taiwan is part of it.
Taiwan itself officially goes by the Republic of China, a name dating back to the government that fled to the island after losing the civil war to Mao Zedong’s Communist forces.
Taiwan’s history is far more complex than the narrative that it has always been part of China, Wu said, with the island ruled by the Dutch, the Spanish, the Qing Empire and Japan at different times.
The Qing Dynasty administered part of Taiwan for more than a hundred years, but it was only between 1885 and 1894 that it attached any real importance to the island and established it as a province — a mere ten years of genuine strategic interest that challenges the current Chinese claims of continued sovereignty.
“China was not the only country there,” he said, arguing this history does not justify Beijing’s ambitions.
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China’s President travelled to North Korea for the first time in seven years, underscoring the strategic importance of ties between the two neighbours.
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Chinese Coast Guard patrols to the east of Taiwan are a “provocative act” and the military will closely coordinate with the island’s Coast Guard in responding, Defence Minister Wellington Koo said on Monday.
China, which views democratically governed Taiwan as its own territory, was angered after Japan and the Philippines said in May that they would begin formal talks on delimiting their maritime boundaries, viewing that as involving waters off Taiwan.
Delimitation is the process of legally establishing the outer limits of a state.
Late on Saturday, Chinese state media said ships had been sent to carry out a “special maritime traffic law-enforcement operation” in the waters east of Taiwan in response to the Japanese and Philippine announcement.
Taiwan’s Coast Guard sent its own ships to warn away the Chinese ones and said on Sunday they had been “expelled” from restricted waters.
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On May 8, Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan broke a grueling six-month stalemate by passing a landmark $25 billion defense budget, catching many observers off guard. The vote brought sudden end to an agonizing legislative deadlock that had pushed U.S.-Taiwanese relations to the edge. For months, long-simmering frustration in Washington over Taiwan’s defense trajectory has threatened to boil over, catalyzed by an unprecedented bipartisan open letter from U.S. senators, demanding that Taiwan authorize the pending defense packages.
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Chinese President Xi Jinping may not need to launch a full-scale invasion of Taiwan to put the island, the U.S. and the global tech economy in crisis, according to national security experts.
Some advisers to President Donald Trump reportedly fear Xi could move against Taiwan within the next five years following Trump’s recent summit with the Chinese leader, Axios reported. One Trump adviser told the outlet the summit signaled a “much higher likelihood” that Taiwan could be “on the table” during that window, warning that the highly vulnerable U.S. semiconductor supply chain would not be ready for such a crisis.
National security experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation that this is simply not the reality on the ground.
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Chinese President Xi Jinping had stern words for President Trump on Taiwan as they met in Beijing on Thursday, warning of potential “clashes and even conflicts” if the issue isn’t “handled properly,” according to Chinese state media.
During their summit, the two leaders are seen as aiming to stabilize their trading relationship after last year’s trade war. They’re also grappling with uncertainty over the United States’ war with Iran. But the issue of Taiwan loomed large.
The closed-door session lasted roughly two hours and 15 minutes. The White House characterized the meeting as “good.”
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A military court on Thursday sentenced Wei Fenghe and Li Shangfu to death with a two-year reprieve. This means their death sentences will be commuted to life imprisonment after two years, without the possibility of sentence reduction or parole, Xinhua reports.
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Authorities are still investigating the reasons of the explosion, with negligence being suspected as a likely cause. Officials warned that the death toll is likely to climb as search and rescue operations continue.
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So far, America has remained ahead in the new space race. But its biggest rival is making continual steps to catch up. China announced another step in that direction with the unveiling of its first ever reusable five-meter-wide composite propulsion module, announced in a press release on April 11th.
The module was designed by the China Aerospace and Technology Corporation (CASC), the primary state contractor for the Chinese space program. Specifically, it was developed at the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT), which is also known as the First Academy of the CASC. It marks the largest integrated composite structure ever manufactured domestically for China’s aerospace sector. The first prototype was completed in just seven months, from initial design to delivery, underscoring the rapid development timeline.
Composites are becoming a critical feature of modern launch systems. Traditional metal components simply weigh too much. The more structural weight a launch vehicle has to carry into orbit, the less cargo or fuel it is able to carry due to the tyranny of the rocket equation. Composites are significantly lighter while still having the physical properties of metal, allowing for more payloads, or, crucially, more fuel for reentry burns.