China and the United States agreed to improve military ties Wednesday after US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld warned that a rapid and secretive military build-up was sending "mixed signals" about China's intentions, US officials said.
President Hu Jintao told Rumsfeld that although the military relationship had improved over the years there was still room to expand, senior US defence officials told reporters. "All this will better help military forces of our two countries to better enhance mutual understanding and friendship," Hu said in the meeting in the Great Hall of the People.
Rumsfeld earlier made an unprecedented visit to the headquarters of the Strategic Rocket Forces whose commander, General Jing Zhiyuan, assured him of China's policy of "no first use" of nuclear weapons, the officials said. The officials interpreted the comments as a disavowal of a statement in June by General Zhu Chenghu who said that if US forces targeted China in a crisis over Taiwan, "I think we will have to respond with nuclear weapons."
Jing told Rumsfeld suggestions that China was targeting other nations were "completely groundless," a senior US official who attended the meeting said.
"As commander of the strategic forces reporting to the Central Military Command I'm in a position to clarify this," the official quoted Jing as saying.
The US officials regarded the visit to the Strategic Rocket Forces headquarters as something of a coup, saying the Chinese for years had denied requests to visit.
Rumsfeld was told he was the first foreigner to set foot in the building, they said. He was briefed on the organisational structure of the command by Jing's senior staff.
Earlier, Rumsfeld and Defence Minister Cao Guangchuan agreed "in principal" on the need for more educational exchanges and other types of military-to-military activities.
Rumsfeld said the contacts were needed "to demystify what we see of them and what they see of us."
In his talks with Cao and in an earlier seminar at a school that grooms future Communist Party leaders, Rumsfeld warned that China's rapid and secretive military build-up had raised questions about its intentions.
Cao denied China had understated its military spending and insisted that raising the living standards of the country's poor made it "impossible to massively increase" military spending. He said Chinese military spending this year totalled about 30 billion dollars, although he acknowledged that the space program and other equipment spending was outside the defence budget. "That is the true budget we have today," he said.
The Pentagon in July estimated the true size of Chinese defence spending at 90 billion dollars a year, with much of it going to sophisticated weaponry that will enable China to project power in the Asia-Pacific region.
Rumsfeld said Washington wanted a constructive relationship with Beijing, but was uncertain whether China "will make the right choices - choices that will serve the world's real interests in regional peace and security." "Many countries, for example, have questions about the pace and the scope of China's military expansion," he told faculty and students at the elite Central Party School. "A growth in China's power projection understandably leads other nations to question China's intentions, and to adjust their behaviour in some fashion," he said.
"The rapid, and - from our perspective at least - non-transparent nature of this build-up contributes to their uncertainty."