Tai Ming Cheung On Arm-Sales Proposals Between Chinese Company and Libyan Military
Secret Bid to Arm Qaddafi Sheds Light on Tensions in China Government
09/12/2011
Michael Wines,
Ocala
At a United Nations conference in Indonesia this summer, an official of the agency that oversees China’s weapons industry ticked off the hurdles that any proposal to sell Chinese weapons abroad must clear. Among them: arms sales must not alter another nation’s internal security. They must not violate United Nations arms embargoes. And they must win government approval.
“If you want to export a product, you should get permission,” said the official, Wang Feng. “You want to talk to some other country, you ship to the country, you should get permission.”
That was on June 11, or roughly a month before three of China’s biggest state-owned arms companies secretly offered to sell Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s army $200 million in weapons to put down the rebellion. The offer, discovered by a Canadian journalist in documents tossed into a Tripoli trash heap, flouted a United Nations embargo on weapons sales to the Qaddafi government — an embargo that China itself had voted for in February.
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Tai Ming Cheung is an associate research scientist at the University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC) located at the University of California, San Diego in La Jolla. He directs the Minerva program on Chinese security and technology, a multi-year academic research and training project funded by the U.S. Defense Department to explore China’s technological potential.
