Bradley Perrett covered China, Japan, South Korea and Australia. He is a Mandarin-speaking Australian.
Before joining Aviation Week in 2006 he was a macroeconomics, politics and aerospace journalist with Reuters. Perrett holds a bachelor’s degree in law from Macquarie University, Sydney. He left Aviation Week in 2020.
BEIJING — Selection of an aircraft for South Korea’s F-X fighter Phase 3 competition will not be made until the first half of next year. The country’s Defense Industry Committee, chaired by the defense minister, says negotiations are stuck on the point of offsets and other conditions, rather than price. The decision to order heavy attack helicopters, almost certainly Boeing AH-64 Apaches, has also been deferred until the first half of 2013.
BEIJING — China is referring to a southern military command as a “theater of operations,” warlike language evidently designed to increase pressure on rival claimants to the South China Sea. The term, unfamiliar in peacetime, has appeared in a report by the state’s Xinhua news agency covering a visit to the southern city of Guangzhou by the new chairman of the Communist Party, Xi Jinping. Xi has inspected the command and called on the Chinese armed forces to increase their “real combat” awareness through military training, Xinhua says.
