Fri, March 13, 2009
WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama told China's top diplomat Thursday that both sides must avoid a repeat of their standoff at sea, while the US navy sent in destroyer escorts for its surveillance voyages.
Obama met Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi following sharp exchanges between Beijing and Washington sparked by the drama involving a US ship and Chinese vessels off China on Sunday.
Obama, making his first foray into Sino-US diplomacy, told Yang he believed it was important to raise the level and frequency of the military dialogue between the sides to "avoid future incidents," the White House said.
His national security advisor James Jones meanwhile directly raised the incident this week when the US survey ship Impeccable was involved in the standoff in the South China Sea.
The US government has said Chinese boats moved directly in front of the US Navy surveillance ship, forcing it to take emergency action to avoid a collision.
China has said the US ship was on a spying mission.
A US defense official meanwhile said the United States had decided to bolster US surveillance patrols in the area with heavily armed destroyers.
"Right now they are going to escort these types of ships for the foreseeable future," the official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said.
A day after Sunday's incident, the USS destroyer Chung-Hoon accompanied the Impeccable -- an unarmed ship designed to track submarines with sonar -- in the same area, the official said.
Earlier, China's official Xinhua news agency said that Yang told the United States after talks with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton Wednesday that Washington must stop meddling in China's internal affairs.
Beijing is fuming over a Tibet resolution that passed the US House of Representatives.
Obama and Yang agreed that China and the United States must work "closely and urgently" to stabilize the global economy.
The two sides need to stimulate "demand at home and abroad, and get credit markets flowing," the White House said.
"The President also emphasized the need to address global trade imbalances."
The meeting came against a backdrop of the deepening global economic crisis, with much of the world looking for the powerhouse economies of China and the United States to chart a road to recovery.
It was set to prepare the ground for the first meeting between Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao on the sidelines of the G-20 summit of developed and developing nations in London in early April.
Yang earlier told members of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington that the Obama-Hu meeting would be a "great success" and both sides viewed it with high importance, Xinhua said.
Obama also warned of the risks from North Korea's missile plans and pledged to work with China to dismantle the state's nuclear program, the White House said, after the International Maritime Organization reported Pyongyang had announced it would launch a satellite early next month.
(Agencies)
