国内英语新闻:China, US communicate on defense issues despite suspension in military exchanges

Hamre is scheduled to meet with another senior Chinese general, Xu Caihou, next Monday.

As vice chairman of China's Central Military Commission, Xu delivered a keynote speech at the CSIS last year while visiting the United States.

The meetings between the Chinese generals and Hamre are a rare occurrence as China cut off some military exchange programs with the United States after Pentagon decided in January to sell a nearly 6.4-billion-U.S.-dollar arms package to Taiwan, an inalienable part of China.

Subsequently, none of the high-level military visits outlined in the China-U.S. communique signed in November last year when U.S. President Barack Obama visited China have been possible for the past eight months.

Those planned visits included trips to Beijing by U.S. defense chief Robert Gates and Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen. A visit to Washington by Chief of General Staff of the Chinese PLA Chen Bingde was also suspended.

On the same day Ma held talks with Hamre, the Chinese foreign ministry said U.S. Deputy National Security Adviser Thomas Donilon and U.S. National Economic Council Chairman Larry Summers will visit China next week.

Donilon and Summers are also scheduled to meet with Chinese General Xu during their stay in Beijing.

"Those U.S. officials' talks with Chinese military leaders reflect the fact the two countries want to keep channels open for defense talks, even though their official military exchanges have stalled," Yang Yi, an strategic expert at China's National Defense University, told Xinhua.

"The suspension of military exchanges does not tally with the state of China-U.S. exchanges in other fields," said Zhu Feng, an international studies professor at Peking University.

Apart from meeting with Chinese generals, Hamre will deliver a speech on broader U.S.-China ties at a seminar in Beijing Saturday.