President Hu Jintao is traveling to Washington this week for a nuclear summit. Reuters reports:
The meeting in Washington D.C. hosted by President Barack Obama will focus on making atomic sites and materials safer from theft and terrorist attack, not broader questions about arms controls and cuts.
But the unprecedented 47-nation meeting that could test China’s approach of staying inside the exclusive club of five official nuclear weapons states and yet sometimes acting as an outsider, critical of the biggest nuclear powers.
“China wants to be grouped with the recognized (nuclear) weapons states, but also wants to be seen as a voice for the demands of the non-nuclear developing world,” said Jing-dong Yuan, an expert on China’s nuclear arms policies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in California.
