Coming down heavily on China’s expansionist designs, the US on Thursday during its first face-to-face meeting with Chinese officials at Anchorage in Alaska said in no uncertain terms that the Biden administration would bring up “deep concerns” about some of China’s actions around the world.
“We’ll also discuss our deep concerns with actions by China, including in Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Taiwan, cyber attacks on the United States, and economic coercion toward our allies. Each of these actions threaten the rules-based order that maintains global stability. That’s why they’re not merely internal matters and why we feel an obligation to raise these issues here today,” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said while welcoming Chinese Director of the Office of the Central Commission for Foreign Affairs Yang Jiechi and Chinese State Councilor Wang Yi to Alaska.
“I said that the United States relationship with China will be competitive where it should be, collaborative where it can be, adversarial where it must be,” he added.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s statement stirred a hornet’s nest prompting the Chinese of accusing the US delegation of being “condescending” in its tone, while a US official said Beijing seemed “intent on grandstanding.”
Triggering an unusually public exchange of diplomatic attacks, the US and China traded unusually intense remarks. While Secretary Blinken called cameras back to counter the comments made by the Chinese with regards to their slights about US democracy, a chain of rebuttals followed from the Chinese.
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Reacting to Blinken’s statement, Director Yang said, “We do not believe in invading through the use of force, or to topple other regimes through various means, or to massacre the people of other countries, because all of those would only cause turmoil and instability in this world. And at the end of the day, all of those would not serve the United States well.”
“So we believe that it is important for the United States to change its own image and to stop advancing its own democracy in the rest of the world. Many people within the United States actually have little confidence in the democracy of the United States, and they have various views regarding the Government of the United States. In China, according to opinion polls, the leaders of China have the wide support of the Chinese people. So no attempt to – the opinion polls conducted in the United States show that the leaders of China have the support of the Chinese people. No attempt to smear China’s social system would get anywhere. Facts have shown that such practices would only lead the Chinese people to rally more closely around the Communist Party of China and work steadily towards the goals that we have set for ourselves,” he added.
Slamming the US on human rights violations, Director Yang said, “On human rights, we hope that the United States will do better on human rights. China has made steady progress in human rights and the fact is that there are many problems within the United States regarding human rights, which is admitted by the U.S. itself as well. The United States has also said that countries can’t rely on force in today’s world to resolve the challenges we face. And it is a failure to use various means to topple the so-called “authoritarian” states. And the challenges facing the United States in human rights are deep-seated. They did not just emerge over the past four years, such as Black Lives Matter. It did not come up only recently. So we do hope that for our two countries, it’s important that we manage our respective affairs well instead of deflecting the blame on somebody else in this world.”