Apparently, China’s Second Artillery uses Powerpoint, too.
Paul Eckert of Reuters has a decent article on Secretary Rumsfeld’s visit to the Second Artillery HQ in Qinghe.
Big events were a PP briefing on the “organization and mission” of the Deuce and a reiteration of China’s “no first use” pledge:
In what senior Pentagon officials said was a promising development, Rumsfeld became the first foreign official to visit the headquarters of China’s Second Artillery Corps, a strategic missile facility at Qinghe outside Beijing.
“We took it as a willingness to engage, albeit gingerly,” said the Pentagon official. He said a Chinese general, Kang Honggui, gave Rumsfeld a PowerPoint presentation of the Second Artillery’s organization and mission.
“This is an opening we’ve been looking for a long time,” said the U.S. official.
[snip]
The commander of the Second Artillery, Gen. Jing Zhiyuan, addressed concerns raised when a Chinese general told reporters in July that China would use nuclear weapons against the United States in the event of U.S intervention in a Taiwan crisis.
The U.S. official quoted Jing as telling Rumsfeld that talk that China was targeting any country with nuclear weapons was “completely groundless”. Jing stressed that his position on the powerful Central Military Commission put him “in a position to clarify this issue”, the U.S. official added.
Late Update: Voice of American reports that Jing Zhiyuan explicitly reiterated China’s no-first-use commitment.
