In his surprise appearance, the former diplomat spoke at length explaining he had left the consulate because he opposes the persecution of dissidents. He also gave examples of kidnappings, life imprisonments and executions carried out by the Chinese government.
When Chinese Nationalist troops fled to Taiwan during the Chinese civil war in the late 1940s, they brought the gangsterism of Shanghai with them. The Chinese Nationalist Army was little more than a rabble of illiterate and uneducated bandits, and many of its senior officers were basically warlords and thugs.
It isn't often that the dark, slimy world of organized crime gets exposed to the light of day, but on May 29 more than 10,000 gangsters from dozens of crime syndicates from across Asia gathered in Taipei.
A Chinese diplomat seeking asylum in Australia after abandoning his post was telling lies about his country to avoid returning home, the Chinese mission in Sydney said. "To achieve the aim of staying in Australia, Chen Yonglin fabricated stories, which are unfounded and purely fictitious," a spokesman for the Chinese Consul-General Qiu Shaofang said in a statement.
The senior Pentagon official said Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld only briefly mentioned the subject in separate meetings in Singapore on Saturday with his South Korean and Japanese counterparts.
The senior defense official said he did not believe the U.S. administration had formally approached other states about taking North Korea to the Security Council.
TOKYO -- The operators of a Tokyo war shrine have refused to remove the remains of war criminals, despite suggestions that doing so could calm other countries' anger over the prime minister's visits to the shrine, a news report said on Saturday.
Yasukuni Shrine honors executed war criminals who are among Japan's 2.5 million war dead. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's annual visits to it have outraged China and other Asian countries that suffered atrocities at the hands of invading Japanese troops during, and in the run-up to, World War II.
Senior leaders of Koizumi's own party have recently been trying to discourage him from making the visits, as tensions have recently escalated between Japan and its neighbors over the shrine visits, territorial disputes and other issues.
However, Japan's ancient Shinto religion was used during World War II to bolster nationalism, and shrine operators said the issue is a religious matter, according to a report from Kyodo News agency.
"This is a matter of Japanese religious faith," Kyodo quoted the shrine's operators as saying. "Their (the war criminals') separate enshrinement will never happen."
Yasukuni enshrines 14 wartime leaders convicted of the most serious war crimes at the international war tribunal in Tokyo, including wartime Prime Minister Hideki Tojo.
The shrine's operators do not acknowledge the tribunal's findings.
神社の運営者は裁判の結果を承認してはいない。
Former Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone's Aug. 15, 1985 official shrine visit Japan's infuriated neighbor countries, prompting most of Nakasone's 10 successors in the past 14 years to drop the practice. Koizumi broke from tradition, making his first visit to the shrine as prime minister in 2001. He has since visited three more times, the last in January 2004.
On Friday, Nakasone said it would be best to remove war criminals' remains from the shrine, and that Koizumi should stop his visits while the measure is being arranged.