US and China hold ‘constructive’ talks in effort to move beyond spy balloon incident
The White House national security adviser met with China’s top diplomat in Vienna as both sides recognised the need to move beyond the spy balloon incident that caused a rupture in relations between the superpowers, a senior US official has said.
The meeting between Jake Sullivan and Wang Yi was not publicised by Washington or Beijing ahead of the talks on Wednesday and Thursday in the Austrian capital. The White House described the wide-ranging discussions, in which the two leaders spent more than eight hours together, as “candid” and “constructive”.
A US administration official, who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity, said both sides recognised that the February incident was “unfortunate” and were now looking to “reestablish standard, normal channels of communications”.
The talks are the latest in a series of small signs that tensions could be easing between the world’s two biggest economies.
As the political and military rivalry between China and the US intensifies, American officials and analysts are worried that a lack of reliable crisis communications could cause a minor confrontation to spiral into greater hostilities.
The White House said in a statement the meeting was part of “ongoing efforts to maintain open lines of communication and responsibly manage competition”, and that Sullivan and Wang discussed key issues in the US-China relationship, Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, Taiwan and more.
The meeting took place in a luxury hotel along Vienna’s historical Ringstrasse, according to an Austrian official familiar with the matter. The official, who was not authorised to comment publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity, said planning for the meeting was closely guarded and Austrian authorities were only given a few days’ advance notice that Vienna had been chosen for the talks.
Chinese officials saw the discussions as “substantive” and said both sides would “continue to make good use of this channel of strategic communication”, according to the official Xinhua news agency.
The US official said Sullivan and Wang did not discuss dates for a possible rescheduled visit to Beijing by the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, but the White House expected the two sides to continue engaging in the coming months.
Blinken cancelled a planned trip to Beijing in February after the US shot down a Chinese balloon that flew over sensitive military sites, plunging the rivals into a diplomatic crisis.
At the Vienna meeting, Sullivan repeated White House concerns about a lack of “constructive engagement” from Beijing to use its influence to press Russia to end its invasion of Ukraine and called on China to do more to stop the movement of illegal drugs, according to the administration official. The US in particular has been pressing China to clamp down on the production of precursor chemicals used to make fentanyl.
Sullivan also raised the cases of three American citizens imprisoned in China – Mark Swidan, Kai Li and David Lin. All three have been designated by the state department as “wrongful detainees”.
The talks between Sullivan and Wang were their first face-to-face meeting since Wang was elevated last year to the Communist party’s politburo, the top policymaking body.
US ambassador Nicholas Burns and China’s foreign minister, Qin Gang, also met in Beijing this week, and Biden’s special envoy for climate, John Kerry, held a call last month with his counterpart, Xie Zhenhua.
Burns, during a virtual forum hosted by the Stimson Centre earlier this month, said communication was improving.
“In the last month or so there’s been a consistent communication between myself and senior officials in the foreign ministry, my colleagues in the US mission and their counterparts in the foreign ministry here.”
With Reuters
Source: The Guardian US
