BEIJING — The United States is trying to enlist Beijing's support for military action against Syria by arguing that it would help deter North Korea from using chemical weapons and threatening security in China's neighborhood, a US official said Tuesday. China expressed support, meanwhile, for a Russian plan to avoid military intervention in the Middle Eastern country by getting the Syrian government to agree to put its chemical weapons under international supervision and eventually destroy them. “As long as it eases the tension and helps maintain Syrian and regional peace and stability, and helps politically settle the issue, the global community should consider it positively,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei told reporters in Beijing. US Under Secretary of Defense for Policy James Miller, who was in Beijing to meet with Chinese officials, said earlier Thursday that a retaliatory strike against the Syrian government would uphold the international norm that chemical weapons must not be used. Miller said he emphasized to his Chinese counterpart that lowering the threshold for chemical weapons use could put US troops at risk and threaten China's security and that of the entire globe. “I emphasized the massive chemical weapons arsenal that North Korea has and that we didn't want to live in a world in which North Korea felt that the threshold for chemical weapons usage had been lowered,” Miller told reporters at a briefing following his talks Monday with Wang Guanzhong, the Chinese army's deputy chief of staff. It was strongly in China's interest that there be a “strong response to Assad's clear and massive use of chemical weapons,” Miller said he told Wang. China has joined with Russia in blocking action against Syria at the United Nations Security Council and strongly opposes strikes on Syria by the US or its allies in response to an Aug. 21 chemical attack near Damascus that the US says killed more than 1,400 people. Beijing has called for political talks to end the violence that has killed an estimated 100,000 people and displaced 2 million more. Hong said China was hosting a visit starting Tuesday by Syrian opposition leaders for talks with Chinese officials. He said they were from the National Coalition for Dialogue, apparently one of a number of smaller opposition groups whose sizes, memberships and alliances are in constant flux. China has hosted delegations from both the opposition and government since the start of the Syrian conflict nearly two years ago, telling both that it hoped for negotiations leading to a process of national reconciliation. — AP
