US National Security Advisor to Meet China’s Top Diplomat
New Delhi: In the middle of the rising tension between China and Taiwan, US President Joe Biden’s national security advisor Jake Sullivan will hold a talk with the top diplomat of China Yang Jiechi in Switzerland. The Zurich meeting comes at a time of heightened tensions between the world’s two largest economies over a range of issues including Taiwan.
China’s foreign ministry said “Yang and Sullivan will “exchange views on China-U.S. relations and relevant issues” during their Zurich meeting.”
Blinken, currently visiting Paris, held a call with Yang in June, stressing the need for cooperation and transparency over the origins of COVID-19, and raised other contentious topics, including China’s treatment of Uyghur Muslims, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.
The White House said in a statement that “The meeting follows up on Biden’s Sept. 9 call with Chinese President Xi Jinping “as we continue to seek to responsibly manage the competition between the United States and the People’s Republic of China.” That call ended a nearly seven-month gap in direct communication between the leaders, and they discussed the need to ensure that competition between the two – with relations sinking to their lowest level in decades – does not veer into conflict.
With trade tensions also at the top of the U.S.-China agenda, U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai, in Paris for Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development meetings, has said she hopes to hold discussions soon with Chinese counterparts.
According to a Chinese media report “China is willing to build mutually beneficial trade with the United States but will not make concessions on principle and is not afraid of a drawn-out contest. The China-U.S. trade war has lasted for more than three-and-a-half years. Instead of being weakened, China’s economy has taken a step forward in comparison with the scale of the US.”
(_Vinayak Barot)
