June 24:
According to a government spokesman, China’s security forces have arrested more than 10 members of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) behind a series of deadly attacks on security forces in Xinjiang shortly before the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Authorities claim the Uighur extremists were planning more attacks. “The suspects confessed to secretly carrying out extremist religious activities, developing and training members, setting up terrorist organizations, actively collecting funds, seeking bomb-making materials and testing improvised explosives in preparation for destructive terrorist activities,” a government spokesman told a press conference in Beijing. Reporters were shown slides of pipe bombs, knives, and a kitchen that was described as a “bomb factory.” The government said some of the suspects had been repatriated from overseas last December, the same month Cambodia deported 20 Uighurs touching off an international outcry, The Guardian reports.
June 25:
For the first time, China’s official media has admitted that North Korea started the Korean War. In a special report, Xinhua's International Affairs journal said: “On June 25, 1950, the North Korean army marched over 38th Parallel and started the attack. Three days later, Seoul fell.” Although many Chinese historians privately admit that Pyongyang was the aggressor in the war, the matter remains highly sensitive and until now China maintained that the War was waged out of American aggression. China’s history textbooks state that: “The War to Resist America and Aid Korea” began when “the United States assembled a United Nations army of 15 countries and defiantly marched across the border and invaded North Korea, spreading the flames of war to our Yalu river,” the Telegraph reports. Meanwhile, the Global Times, a government-run newspaper, published a short editorial cryptically arguing that it is “high time to renew and strengthen efforts by Chinese scholars to discover the truth about the Korean War.”
[Editor’s Note: North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency has published an article entitled, “U.S., Provoker of Korean War,” in which it said: “All the historical facts show that it is the U.S. imperialists who unleashed the war in Korea and that the United States can never escape from the responsibility.”]
An interpreter for President Hu Jintao, Zhang Liucheng, was executed for divulging the content of conversations between the president and North Korean leader Kim Jong-il to South Korea. Zhang served as the deputy director of the Korea Division at the International Department of the Communist Party of China and helped handle the logistics for Kim’s visit. Zhang was arrested during an ongoing anti-spy operation by the ministry of public security – named Operation Spring Sunshine – which primarily deals with counter-intelligence activities by Japan, South Korea and the North, and has previously uncovered other cases of espionage by China’s neighbors. These include Li Dunqiu, a researcher with the State Council who handed over state secrets to North Korea, Hong Kong’s Apple Daily reports.
June 27:
The Chinese navy’s 5th escort task force deployed in the Gulf of Aden to fight Somali pirates is using the exercises to improve its rapid-reaction time. The pirates appear in small groups, attack merchant ships in open waters, grab their booty, and flee. To counter these tactics, Chinese forces are now capable of deployment within four minutes, the official People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Daily reports. To improve the rapid-reaction ability of PLA ship-based helicopters, for instance, the task force’s training exercises included rapid combat transition, flights at daybreak and night, and ship-based slide landings, the Press Trust of India reports.
June 28:
On the sidelines of the G20 economic summit in Toronto, Canada, the U.S. president has accused China of “willful blindness” over North Korea's sinking of a South Korean warship in March. Barack Obama said he hoped that President Hu Jintao would recognize that North Korea crossed a line in the sinking of the Cheonan, which killed 46 South Korean sailors. “There's a difference between restraint and willful blindness to consistent problems,” Obama said. “My hope is that President Hu will recognize as well that this is an example of Pyongyang going over the line.” International investigators concluded last month that North Korea torpedoed the warship near the Korean sea border on March 26 and Obama wants the UN Security Council to produce a “crystal-clear acknowledgment” of the North's alleged action, which would require the cooperation of veto-wielding member China. Separately, Naoto Kan, Japan's new prime minister, also encouraged Hu to join world leaders in condemning the North, al-Jazeera reports.
