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Kabul: China’s foreign minister remarked that the United States’ fixation on suppressing China could potentially undermine efforts to enhance relations between the world’s largest economies.
Relations between the two nations plummeted to their lowest point in decades last year due to disagreements spanning technology, trade, human rights, Taiwan’s status, the interception of an alleged Chinese spy balloon over the U.S., and Beijing’s stance on conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East.
Foreign Minister Wang Yi noted “some improvements” in U.S.-China relations since Presidents Joe Biden and Xi Jinping convened for a summit in California in November, marking their first meeting in a year. However, Wang stated that the U.S. still harbors misconceptions about China and aims to constrain its progress. He criticized the mounting unilateral sanctions on Chinese technology and other firms, deeming them “reaching bewildering levels of unfathomable absurdity.”
“If the United States says one thing and does another, where is its credibility as a major country?” he said at a wide-ranging news conference in Beijing on the sidelines of the annual meeting of China’s rubber-stamp legislature. “If it gets jittery every time it hears the word ‘China,’ where is its confidence as a major country?”
“The challenges the U.S. faces lie within itself, not in China,” Wang continued, noting that this year is the 45th anniversary of the establishment of formal U.S.-China relations. “If the United States is obsessed with suppressing China, it will eventually harm itself.”
On the Israel-Hamas war, Wang called for an immediate cease-fire, the release of all detainees and the provision of humanitarian aid, saying the “long-standing occupation of Palestinian territories cannot be ignored.”
“Only by delivering justice to the Palestinian people and fully implementing a two-state solution can we break the vicious cycle of the Israel-Palestine conflict,” he said.
On Taiwan, Wang said that elections held on the island in January “are just local elections in one part of China.”
“The result does not change even in the slightest terms the basic fact that Taiwan is part of China,” he said.
Wang said that while China will continue to strive for “peaceful reunification” with Taiwan, Beijing’s bottom line is “quite clear: We will never allow Taiwan to be separated from the Chinese motherland.”
