The top US diplomat said his conversations touched on the Ukraine war and North Korea, and that he raised US concerns “shared by a growing number of countries about the (People’s Republic of China’s) provocative actions to the Taiwan Strait, as well as in the South and East China Seas.” He said the US position on Taiwan has not changed and pressed China over human rights. “The US needs to remove the obstacle first,” he told reporters. Yang Tao, director-general of the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s North American and Oceanian Affairs department, on Monday blamed the sanctions on Li for the ongoing impasse. It is very important that we restore those channels,” he said. I think that’s an issue that we have to keep working on. “At this moment, China has not agreed to move forward with that. Contacts between the country’s top military officials remain frozen, and two recent incidents have raised concerns that the fraught relationship could veer into conflict.Ĭhina recently rebuffed a meeting between Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Chinese Defense Minister Li Shangfu, who is under US sanction, in Singapore, although the two did speak briefly.īlinken said that although he raised the need for such channels of communication “repeatedly” in his meetings, there was “no immediate progress.” One of the key issues that did not get resolved was that of restoring military-to-military communications between the US and China.
‘No immediate progress’ on military-to-military communications President Joe Biden was “closely monitoring” Blinken’s trip, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters Monday, adding that the US president was “updated regularly” by his national security team. It’s a process,” the top US diplomat said. “But again, I want emphasize none of this gets resolved with one visit, one trip, one conversation. “We’re not going to have success on every issue between us on any given day, but in a whole variety of areas, on the terms that we set for this trip, we have made progress and we are moving forward,” he said. “I came to Beijing to strengthen high-level channels of communication, to make clear our positions and intentions in areas of disagreement, and to explore areas where we might work together on our interests, align on shared transnational challenges, and we did all of that,” Blinken said. “And both sides recognized the need to work to stabilize it.” “It was clear coming in that the relationship was at a point of instability,” Blinken said at a news conference in the Chinese capital Monday. ‘Both sides recognized the need to work to stabilize’ relationship The top US diplomat, speaking after two days of meetings in Beijing with top officials including President Xi Jinping, said that there are key issues between the nations that remain unresolved, but noted that his “hope and expectation is we will have better communications, better engagement going forward.”īlinken is the first US secretary of state to visit Beijing in five years, and his talks with senior Chinese officials were seen as a key litmus test for whether the two governments could stop relations from continuing to plummet at a time of lingering distrust. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Monday said that the United States and China had made “progress” toward steering relations back on track as both sides agreed on the need to “stabilize” the bilateral relationship between the two superpowers.
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