China fumes at 'hijacked' climate talks accusation

I / Beijing December 22, 2009, 10:19 IST

China today dismissed a British editorial accusing it of "hijacking" the UN-sponsored climate talks in Copenhagen as baseless and politically motivated.

British climate change minister Edward Miliband's editorial singled out Beijing as the culprit behind the talks' near collapse.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said the piece seemed designed to sow discord among developing nations.

She said the comments by an individual British politician - not mentioning Miliband by name - were an attempt to "shirk the obligations of developed countries to their developing counterparts and foment discord among developing countries, but the attempt was doomed to fail".

Miliband yesterday wrote in The Guardian newspaper that most countries - developed and developing - supported binding cuts in emissions, but that "some leading developing countries currently refuse to countenance this".

"We did not get an agreement on 50 per cent reductions in global emissions by 2050 or on 80 per cent reductions by developed countries. Both were vetoed by China, despite the support of a coalition of developed and the vast majority of developing countries," he wrote.

"We cannot again allow negotiations on real points of substance to be hijacked in this way," he wrote.