Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang doesn’t want to hear about “confrontation” in his next meeting with Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
“China and the U.S. are in communication on the specifics of the visit,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said Tuesday. “We also hope that the U.S. will perceive China correctly, pursue dialogue and win-win cooperation, not confrontation and zero-sum competition, work with China in the same direction, and fully deliver on the important common understandings reached between the two heads of state and bring the China-U.S. relations back to the track of sound and steady growth.”
Blinken revealed recently that he plans “to travel to China in the coming weeks” for meetings with Qin, who was promoted to his current role in December after a stint as the top Chinese diplomat in Washington. U.S. and Chinese officials alike have framed that trip as an extension of President Joe Biden’s November meeting with Chinese General Secretary Xi Jinping as the United States and its allies work to mitigate the threat of a clash with Chinese forces.
“We — both of our countries, Japan and the United States — have complex and consequential relationships with China, and there are clearly aspects of intense competition between us,” Blinken said last week during a press conference with Japanese officials as he discussed the upcoming visit to Beijing. “There are aspects as well of cooperation, and it’s important to see if we can pursue those.”
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Japanese officials visited Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin last week to discuss the coordination of U.S. and Japanese national security strategies as Tokyo and Washington have been alarmed by China’s military buildup, threatening gestures toward Taiwan, and expansive claims of sovereignty in the South China Sea and East China Sea.
“China presents an unprecedented and the greatest strategic challenge,” Japanese Foreign Minister Hayashi Yoshimasa said last week. “Its foreign policy to recreate international order to serve its self-interest is a grave concern for the Japan-U.S. Alliance and for the whole of the international community.”
Wang, the Chinese spokesman, condemned the U.S.-Japan dialogues by invoking “Japan’s militarist past” — an allusion to the Imperial Japanese regime that fell in the Second World War.
“To justify its aggressive military buildup, Japan has been falsely hyping up regional tensions. It is even seeking to bring NATO into the Asia-Pacific,” he said Monday. “We call on the U.S. and Japan to step out of the Cold-War mentality, quit the obsession with containing and suppressing China, stop dangerously ramping up military buildup and propagating chaos in the world, and return to the right path of peace, friendship, and cooperation.”
Blinken said the U.S. is “not looking for conflict” but won’t concede to China’s ambitions either.
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“We are going to compete vigorously,” he said. “We’re not looking for conflict. We’ll manage the competition responsibly, but we will compete vigorously. And we will seek to keep these lines of communication open and do all that we can to establish guardrails to prevent competition, as I said, from veering into conflict.”
