BEJING, Apr 18China has banned its entrepreneurs from exporting and importing activities with American arms manufacturers Lockheed Martin and Raytheon Missiles & Defense because of the supply of weapons to Taiwan, the Ministry of Commerce of China said on Tuesday.
«Lockheed Martin and Raytheon Missiles & Defense have been involved in arms sales to Taiwan for a long time, this is a bad thing. Therefore, we have decided to ban the two companies from importing and exporting activities related to China in order to prevent the use of Chinese products in their military production,» the ministry's website said in a statement.
The Ministry of Commerce explained that Chinese companies, knowing that two companies are the real importer or customer, should not carry out export and import activities. Violators of this requirement will be held accountable.
In addition, the agency indicated that since February 16 this year, China has banned the representatives of the top management of companies from entering, working, staying and living in China.
Earlier, Bloomberg reported, citing sources, that Taiwan will purchase up to 400 ground-based Harpoon missiles from the American aircraft manufacturer Boeing to repel a possible attack from China.
The situation around Taiwan escalated significantly after a visit to the island in early August last year by then-Speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi. China, which considers the island one of its provinces, condemned Pelosi's visit, seeing in this move US support for Taiwanese separatism, and held large-scale military exercises.
Official relations between the central government of the People's Republic of China and its island province were interrupted in 1949 after the Kuomintang forces led by Chiang Kai-shek, defeated in a civil war with the Communist Party of China, moved to Taiwan. Business and informal contacts between the island and mainland China resumed in the late 1980s. Since the early 1990s, the parties began to contact through non-governmental organizations — the Beijing Association for the Development of Relations across the Taiwan Strait and the Taipei Foundation for Cross-Strait Exchanges.