- guardian.co.uk, Friday June 23 2000 02.58 BST
Ms Albright pressed her hosts to respond favourably to peace overtures by Taiwan's new president, Chen Shui-bian, and she raised US concerns about human rights abuses in China. Beijing's foreign minister, Tang Jiaxuan, retorted that the US should stop selling arms to Taiwan, exclude it from any defence arrangement and avoid encouraging pro-independence tendencies there.
As the most senior US official to visit Beijing since last year's US bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, Ms Albright also hoped to give a boost to relations between China and the US. Mr Tang said cautiously that "bilateral relations have shown a certain improvement, especially after the setback last year."
The Chinese argument against Washington's national missile defence programme (NMD) has been strengthened by the success of last week's summit between the leaders of North and South Korea. This has been widely interpreted as reducing the threat of a "rogue" North Korean missile, which the US uses to justify its "son of star wars" project.
Beijing strategists have already argued that the US project will "compromise China's strategic capability".
A report to be issued by the Oxford Research Group, based on a recent conference with Chinese military experts in Beijing, warns that Chinese opposition to the NMD should not be under-estimated.
In a paper written for the conference, Major-General Pan Zhengqiang said that the missile programme would force China and Russia "to take measures to uphold the credibility of their respective strategic deterrents". It would poison relations between the three major nuclear powers and prompt "a new round of the arms race".
Chinese senior officials believe that since Beijing has helped to bring about détente on the Korean peninsula, the US should think again about the effects of the programme on its relations with China.
The image of North Korea as a "rogue state" which might launch a suicidal nuclear attack on the US has been frequently invoked by Washington. The term was used only last week by the defence secretary, William Cohen, on Russian television. But in a sign of embarrassment this week, the US state department announced that it will instead refer in the future to North Korea and other former "rogues", including Iran and Iraq, as "states of concern". China's foreign ministry spokesman, Zhu Bangzao, said last night that Beijing's opposition to NMD was "consistent and clear". It was equally opposed to the theatre missile defence package being considered by Japan, in which Taiwan has expressed an interest.
"China has consistently held that the US pretext for developing [these] systems does not have a leg to stand on," he said.
Another Chinese strategist quoted in the Oxford Research Group report, Dr Yan Xuetong, said the NMD would "invigorate the US-Japan alliance and make Japan more likely to become involved in potential military conflicts in the Taiwan Straits."
