Wednesday, July 22, 2009

China and Russia in Joint Military Exercise

BEIJING/MOSCOW (Reuters) - China and Russia were holding a joint military exercise on Wednesday, with the drill seen as a chance to beef up anti-terrorism cooperation after the recent flare-up of violence in China's Xinjiang region.

The "Peace Mission 2009" five-day exercise in northeast China comes weeks after China's worst ethnic unrest in decades between Muslim Uighurs and Han Chinese in the far-western region of Xinjiang that killed at least 197 people.

"To some extent, the July 5 Xinjiang riot pushed forward anti-terrorism cooperation between China and Russia," the China Daily newspaper quoted Major Wang Haiyun, a former Chinese military attache to Russia, as saying.

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