China has canceled the initially planned military talks with the United States in protest against Washington's sanctions on Beijing for buying weapons and fighter planes from Russia.
China's Defense Ministry said in a statement that it would recall the country's top ranking navy official, Shen Jinlong, who is attending a conference in the US and is scheduled to visit the Pentagon this week, according to Reuters.
The ministry said that the sanctions from the US are blatant violations of international norms and the reported breach of relations between Beijing and Washington.
Earlier, China has summoned the US ambassador to issue a warning for the White House of consequences if it will continue to impose the sanctions set on Thursday by the US State Department.
As added by the Defense Ministry, China's military has all the rights to take any actions it deemed fit to develop its own countermeasures with the need to answer to any external policies.
Wu Qian, the Ministry spokesperson, reiterated that Beijing's decision to purchase fighter jets and missile systems from Russia was nothing but a normal act of cooperation between two sovereign countries and that the US definitely has no right whatsoever to interfere such transactions.
Sanctions Over Weapons Purchase
As reported on this site last week, the US government has imposed sanctions on China's Equipment Development Department (EDD), an agency which is part of the larger Ministry of Defense for purchasing Russian Su-35 combat planes and several units of S-400 Surface-to-Air missiles and its accompanying systems equipment from Rosoboronexport.
The deal, which was made in August 2017, saw the delivery of 10 of the said Russian Sukhhoi warplanes and the initial batch of ballistic missiles which were delivered at a later date.
An unnamed official from the US State Department said that the sanction that currently affects Beijing is actually targeting Kremlin. According to the source, the Trump government is keen on castigating Moscow for some reasons such as its purported involvement in the 2016 US election, its participation in the Syrian civil war, and even its annexation of Crimea in 2014.
Aside from EED, the sanction reportedly included 33 Russian defense and intelligence personalities on Washington's Blocked Persons List. The blacklist, as BBC explained, will ban any entities from doing business with Americans. Furthermore, this will also put any of their assets in the US on hold.
In its defense, Russia said that this sanction is an attempt by the White House to squeeze out from the weapons market any competition that would endanger the interests of its domestic weapons industry.
