Lifting China arms embargo getting harder, UK says

The planned lifting of an EU ban on arms sales to China has become harder since Beijing passed a law granting itself the right to use force to thwart any independence bid by Taiwan, Britain said on Sunday. "Politically there are problems and these problems have actually got more difficult rather than less difficult, not least because there hasn't been much movement by China in respect of human rights," Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said.
"And for their own reasons they decided to pass this new law authorising the use of force in the event of Taiwan seceding. So it's created quite a difficult political environment," Straw told ITV television.
The EU is planning to end the ban imposed after the bloody crackdown on Tiananmen Square democracy protesters in 1989, hoping that the embargo's removal will improve Europe's ties with Beijing.
The bloc has suggested a new "code of conduct" covering all EU arms exports, and a requirement on member states to tell each other what they are selling to China.
But Washington and Tokyo think the EU's new controls are too weak. Diplomats say Britain is caught in the middle.
China passed a law on Monday granting itself the right to attack Taiwan if it moved to independence, days after unveiling a 12.6 percent rise in its defence budget to nearly $30 billion.
It denied either move meant it had Taiwan in its sights. But the United States, which is bound to defend Taiwan in the event of an attack, swiftly denounced the new law as "unfortunate".
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who has repeatedly expressed US concern over China's military build-up, had her sharpest words yet for the European plan to lift the arms embargo, shortly before she arrived in Beijing.
"The European Union should do nothing to contribute to a circumstance in which Chinese military modernisation draws on European technology, or even the political decision to suggest that it could draw on European technology when, in fact, it is the United States - not Europe - that has defended the Pacific," Rice told reporters in Seoul.