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Agencies
The United States and China barrelled into their first high-level talks since March trading sanctions and rhetorical barbs, raising the stakes for the effort to stabilise strained relations between the world’s two largest economies.
Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, the US’ No. 2 diplomat, is set to meet Foreign Minister Wang Yi on Monday (July 26) in Tianjin, about 97km east of the capital Beijing.
The visit follows a series of Biden administration actions challenging China’s red lines on what it considers its internal affairs, prompting Beijing to protest and announce fresh sanctions against Americans including former commerce secretary Wilbur Ross.
Sherman intends to raise concerns about human rights in places such as Hong Kong and Xinjiang while seeking to reassure Beijing that the US is not building an anti-China coalition, senior administration officials told reporters on Saturday.
High-level engagement is needed to ensure responsible management of US-China ties and cooperation on issues of common interest, such as climate change, said the officials, who asked not to be identified because the meeting’s agenda has not been made public.
The talks are the first between top American and Chinese diplomats since the two sides had a testy exchange in Alaska, although they have since communicated by phone and US climate envoy John Kerry has spoken with his Chinese counterpart.
If the latest discussions are fruitful, they could set up a meeting between US President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping, possibly at a Group of 20 summit in October.
“Neither side wants to appear to be softening its position after the chilly Alaska meetings,” said Dr Avery Goldstein, professor of international relations at the University of Pennsylvania.
Beijing and Washington will have to show they can get to grips with their disagreements without appearing to domestic audiences that they are giving ground.
On Saturday, Wang said that if the US has not learnt to treat other countries equally, China and the international community have the obligation to help the US make up for this lesson.
Wang made the remarks when holding the third strategic dialogue between China and Pakistan with Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi.
In response to US State Department spokesman’s comments made before the visit of Ms Sherman to China that the US will deal with China from “a position of strength”, Mr Wang said the US always wants to use its strength to pressure other countries and it thinks that it is superior.
However, there has never been a country superior to others in the world, and China will not accept such a claim by any country, Mr Wang said.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said last week that Beijing would use the meetings to “make clear our principles and positions on developing China-US relations”.
Warning the Americans not to try to negotiate from a position of strength, Zhao said: “We did not buy it in Anchorage and we will not buy this in Tianjin.”
Sherman’s trip is part of a broad US diplomatic push in the region, as Mr Biden attempts to extract American forces from Afghanistan and bolster Washington’s frayed foreign relationships to better answer the challenges posed by China’s rise.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken is slated to visit India this week while Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin is travelling to Singapore, Vietnam and the Philippines.
In Tokyo last week, Ms Sherman along with her Japanese and South Korean counterparts discussed preserving peace in the Taiwan Strait, a reference to China’s military pressure campaign against the democratically ruled island.
The statement prompted protests from China, with Zhao saying the US and Japan are “stuck in the Cold War mentality” and deliberately seeking bloc confrontation and attempting to form an “anti-China encirclement”.
Separately, the US and numerous allies blamed the Microsoft Exchange hack to actors affiliated with the Chinese government and said Beijing’s leadership was responsible for an array of “malicious cyber activities”.
The US also charged four Chinese nationals linked to the Ministry of State Security with a campaign to hack into computer systems of companies, universities and government entities.
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26/07/2021
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