The US is urged to take more actions with sincerity to improve bilateral relations and stop provocative moves on issues of China’s concern, especially the Taiwan question, analysts said, after a US State Department spokesperson told media that Washington expects to host Chinese top diplomat Wang Yi in the US before year-end.
State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller was cited by Reuters in a report on Monday that if Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi attends the UN General Assembly (UNGA), Washington expects US Secretary of State Antony Blinken will “host” Wang either at the UNGA or after.
As of press time on Tuesday, China has not released any information about whether senior officials will attend next week’s UNGA in the US.
By discussing its expectation to host China’s top diplomat, the Biden administration is attempting to grasp a window of opportunity before the presidential election period to prevent the bilateral relations from further worsening, Sun Chenghao, a fellow and head of the US-EU program at the Center for International Security and Strategy at Tsinghua University, told the Global Times on Tuesday.
Biden has maintained the idea that meetings between the countries’ top leaders would stabilize China-US relations. However, the plan was disturbed by the balloon incident and the US’ continuous hype over it in February, Sun said.
During a trip to Vietnam on Sunday, Biden said that he hopes to meet with Chinese top leader “soon” and he claimed that the US “does not want to contain China.”
When Biden and US senior officials talk about setting “guardrails” for China-US relations, they do not mean warmer ties. Instead they wish to maintain competition against China while avoiding direct clashes for the benefit of the US. This is why it has not ceased playing the Taiwan card, drawing together small cliques to contain China, or refuse to relax sanctions, Sun said.
Meetings between leaders of China and the US would increase confidence and anticipation for future relations, but the US lacks sincerity in truly improving China-US ties given the significant gap between what the US government is saying and what it is doing, Li Haidong, a professor at the China Foreign Affairs University, told the Global Times on Tuesday.
After US Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo’s visit to China at the end of August, the two countries have made some progress in some fields, including the communication mechanism on commerce, but the Biden administration’s China policy has not changed and the competition it incited against China has intensified, Li said.
The difficulty of China-US relations lies in the US side and hyping high-level meetings while showing insufficient sincerity would not help fix the problem, said the expert.
(Global Times)
