Senator Joseph Biden, the new chairman of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, led a four-member senate delegation to Beijing during this week. The delegation has met with president Jiang Zemin, premier Zhu Rongji and the foreign minister Tang Jiaxuan. Biden expressed confidence that the US and China would resolve their differences as they expand economic and trade links, saying that "China is not an enemy.”

According to the Japanese embassy in Beijing Tuesday, Japan decided to lift some of its import bans on Chinese chicken, turkey and eggs. This move was welcomed by China as "conducive to the resumption and development of the poultry trade.”

Victims of germ warfare during the Japanese invasion of China in the 1930s to 1940s, prepared over the weekend for their 25th hearing against the Japanese Government. Some former soldiers with Japanese Unit 731 and Japanese lawyers working for the delegation of plaintiffs joined a meeting in the capital city of East China's Zhejiang Province to prepare the case against the Japanese Government. Yoshio Shinozuka, 78, said on Tuesday he is anguished over the cruelty Unit 731, of which he was a member, perpetrated on Chinese victims in Pingfang, a city in Northeast China's Heilongjiang Province, during the war.

China is concerned about the proposed regular multilateral security talks among the United States, Japan and Australia, and believes that a dialogue mechanism of any kind should be aimed at maintaining the peace and stability of the Asia-Pacific region.

A team of researchers, led by Italian embryologist Severino Antinori, announced at the US National Academy of Sciences that they would soon pioneer efforts to clone humans in an effort to help childless couples become biological parents. This unleashed a furor in the scientific community over the morality of creating duplicates of living people.

Kim Jong Il, the leader of North Korea, paid a nine-day visit across Siberia by train. He met with Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia. The two leaders signed a declaration which focused on strategic stability and the guidelines of expanding bilateral friendship and cooperation. Relations between the two countries, which have stagnated for over a decade, have warmed. The two leaders also reaffirmed their commitment to peace and security on the Korean Peninsula and in Northeast Asia.

(CIIC 08/12/2001)