China flag row mars US-Russia arms talks

Vienna: A row between the US and China has marred the first day of US-Russia disarmament talks, with the American delegation using a photo of Chinese flags to needle Beijing, prompting a sharp Chinese response.

The US has said the China, which possesses a growing nuclear arsenal, should be involved in the talks to replace the New Start treaty between the US and Russia which was agreed in 2010 and expires in February 2021. But China has always refused the prospect of tripartite negotiations. As the negotiations got under way in Vienna on Monday the American envoy to the talks Marshall Billingslea tweeted that China was “a no-show”. “Beijing still hiding behind #GreatWallofSecrecy on its crash nuclear build-up, and so many other things,” he wrote. The tweet was accompanied by a photo of the room where talks are taking place showing an empty negotiating table with Chinese flags on it. That prompted an irritated response from Fu Cong, head of the department of arms control at the Chinese foreign ministry. “What an odd scene!” Fu tweeted in reply. “Displaying Chinese National Flags on a negotiating table without China´s consent!” he added, asking: “Wonder how LOW you can go?”

China´s mission in Vienna also ridiculed Billingslea´s tweet as “performance art”. According to the Kommersant daily, which cited Russian diplomatic sources, Russian representatives opposed the idea of having Chinese flags present in order to symbolise Beijing´s absence. The Americans therefore “put the flags of the three countries up and took photos” in order to publish the photos before the negotiations. “Before the Russian delegation arrived, they removed it all,” the paper reports. The US and Russia possess more than 90 percent of the world´s nuclear arsenal between them and experts say the US´s insistence on involving China in the talks is an attempt to justify the possible abandoning of the treaty.