"We have taken note of the bill," said Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei/XINHUA
BEIJING, May 22 – China on Monday voiced its opposition to a defence spending bill passed last week by the US House of Representatives that pushed for sales of F-16 jets to Taiwan.
“We have taken note of the bill,” said Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei at a news briefing, adding that China firmly opposes US lawmakers’ exaggeration of China’s military development and push for arms sales to Taiwan.
The House of Representatives voted Friday to require the United States to sell F-16 C/D fighter-jets to Taiwan.
“China sticks to the path of peaceful development,” said the spokesman, adding it is baseless and irresponsible for anyone to play up the “China threat theory.”
“To push for weapons sales to Taiwan severely violates the one-China policy and the three joint communiqués between China and the United States, which severely interferes with China’s internal affairs,” Hong said.
During the briefing, Hong urged “some US lawmakers” to get rid of their Cold War mentality and stop pushing for arms sales to Taiwan and all wrongdoings of interfering with China’s internal affairs.
“(They should) do more to help China-US relations and the mutual trust between the two nations, not the contrary,” he added.
About The Author
Xinhua News Agency, founded on November 7, 1931, is China’s national news agency as well as a global news and information network. Xinhua has set up a global news and information gathering network, with headquarters in Beijing, 33 domestic bureaus in provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities plus the special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macao, as well as 140 bureaus in the rest of the world. Xinhua is yet to set up a bureau in Taiwan, where it has posted resident correspondents. Xinhua provides its worldwide subscribers with news and financial information products in the forms of text, photo, graphics, audio, video, and mobile phone text messages 24 hours a day in eight languages: Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Arabic, Portuguese and Japanese.