The Hindu : Beijing issues new non-proliferation norms

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Oct 21, 2002

International

International

Beijing issues new non-proliferation norms

By P. S. Suryanarayana

SINGAPORE Oct. 20. Accelerating the pace of a non-proliferation overdrive, China has promulgated new regulations to control the export of certain chemicals and dual-use biological agents.

The related equipment and technologies are also covered under the new restrictions.

The measures, announced over the weekend, are designed to enhance China's image as a credible and serious power, with the necessary political will to curb the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

The latest announcements in Beijing about China's new non-proliferation norms are a sequel to the recent controls that the country mandated to regulate the export of ballistic missiles and the related know-how and equipment to other States.

For a number of years now, China has also supported the principle of preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons too.

The latest flurry of executive orders has, coincidentally or otherwise, signalled China's heightened relevance to the international efforts to manage the complex non-proliferation issues at this critical juncture.

Only a few days ago, the U.S. disclosed that its diplomatic emissary had been informed by North Korea that it was engaged in developing nuclear weapons in a clandestine operation.

The U.S. intelligence community had, often in the past, voiced concerns that China might in some ways be behind the nuclear weaponisation programmes of the impoverished North Korea in Beijing's neighbourhood.

China, for its part, tends to discount and dismiss such accusations as also the suspicions that Beijing had, in some way or the other, put Islamabad through its paces as regards its plans to acquire nuclear arms and ballistic missiles capable of delivering them.

Authoritative Chinese sources said that Beijing's non-proliferation policies at this time had been determined by the political realities that had come to dominate the international stage since the end of the Cold War over a decade ago.

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