China, North Korea | featured news

U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said Monday that U.S. and Japanese officials have agreed to put a second missile defense system in Japan... While officials insisted the radar system would not be aimed at China, the decision was sure to raise the ire of Beijing.

Washington has urged the governments in Tokyo and Seoul to increase cooperation. But the pact triggered an uproar in South Korea, where resentment of Japan’s early 20th-century colonization remains raw and the public regards any sign of Japan’s growing military role with deep suspicion.

A treaty between South Korea and Japan will encourage the sharing of military data on their common concerns: North Korea’s threats and China’s military expansion.

China has provided some assistance to North Korea's missile program, U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said on Thursday, a week after the hermit state's failed rocket launch triggered international condemnation.

A joke circulating among officials in Beijing pretty much underlines the bind China is in over North Korea's plans to send a satellite into space. North Korea's young ruler Kim Jong-un phones a Chinese leader to tell him about timing of the planned rocket launch. "When will it be?" asks the Chinese leader. Kim replies: "Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four..."

The first official talks between the two countries since the coming to power of the youthful new North Korean leader were “serious and substantial,” an American negotiator said Thursday.

A U.S. envoy will hold talks with North Korea on its nuclear program in Beijing next week, the first such negotiations since the death of the nation's longtime leader, Kim Jong Il.

With its secretive dynastic dictators and its nuclear-armed military, North Korea produces its fair share of intrigue even without the help of Chinese social media. But in recent days, netizens in China added their own plot twist, posting rumors about a military coup that upended young leader Kim Jong Eun.

This week saw what appeared to be a re-injection of warmth and energy in relations between two longtime ideological allies with a shared history of fighting side by side in war. No. Not that “special relationship” between the U.S. and U.K. That other one, between North Korea and China.

The United States and South Korea began joint military exercises in waters west of the Korean Peninsula Sunday that have been opposed by regional giant China and have led to North Korea threatening "consequences."