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—Japan will buy 12 fighters during the next five years, along with trickle production of other types of aircraft and warships, according to a defense plan that significantly expands the scope for cooperation. The navy will operate more ballistic-missile defense destroyers while the army fields fewer tanks.
BEIJING — A Chinese state document has referred to the government having “put forward” a plan in 2009 to build aircraft carriers, adding to widespread expectations that such a program is in hand or imminent. The “Sunday Morning Post,” a Hong Kong newspaper that obtained the document, presents it as the first official confirmation of a carrier program, but the wording seems less than categorical.
BEIJING — Chinese space contractor CASC has taken a Bolivian order for a communications satellite based on the DFH-4 bus of subsidiary CAST. The TKSat-1 satellite will be fitted with 30 transponders and launched from the Xichang base in Sichuan by a Long March 3B or 3E rocket from another CASC subsidiary, CALT, according to China Great Wall Industry Corp., the group’s international sales agency.
