The United States Tuesday renewed calls for the European Union to maintain a 15-year-old ban on arms sales to China amid signs the EU embargo may be lifted with Britain's support.
"The United States has repeatedly expressed its concerns to European Union member states regarding possible lifting of the arms embargo against China," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said.
"In our view, lifting the ban would not contribute to regional stability and would send the wrong signal to China regarding its continued poor human rights record".
Boucher's comments came in a written answer to a question posed at Tuesday's State Department news briefing about a report that Britain, Washington's top European ally, would likely back an anticipated EU move to drop the embargo.
Britain is expected to line up alongside France and Germany in arguing that the restrictions, imposed after the 1989 massacre of pro-democracy protestors in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, should be ended, The Times newspaper reported Tuesday.
In return, Britain is pushing for Beijing to sign up to an international agreement guaranteeing human rights, the paper said, citing unnamed senior British officials.
It said London understood the US opposition - which could lead to European nations that sell arms to China to be denied US military technology - but that it also believed a new EU code of conduct on arms sales would stop weapons being used by China for "external aggression or internal repression".
Earlier this month, Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao appealed to the EU to lift the arms ban as he visited Brussels as part of a European tour.
The report comes as China ratchets up the pressure against Taiwan, which Beijing has long promised to reunite with the mainland by force if necessary, despite the island's 50-plus years of effective independence.
Boucher also repeated a longstanding US warning that China's military build-up against Taiwan was destabilising.
"Military coercion was counterproductive," he said. "We do see the military build-up and missile deployments as destabilising".
Those comments came two days after the Pentagon said in a report that Beijing was developing "credible military options" to prevent Taiwan from achieving independence, including tools to discourage the United States from coming to the island's aid in a conflict with the mainland.
Beijing's arsenal arrayed against Taiwan includes approximately 500 short-range ballistic missiles.
Earlier, China had defended its military build-up as essential to safeguard national sovereignty and accused the Pentagon of having "ulterior motives" and maintaining Cold War thinking. Cross-strait tensions have been on the rise since 2000, when independence-leaning politician Chen Shui-bian became Taiwanese president.
Asked to reconcile the facts that the United States and China were enjoying a warmer relationship and better co-operation, and that United States still publicly treated China as a threat, Boucher stressed that Washington's position had always been consistent.
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