Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi yesterday, on the sidelines of an enlarged ASEAN foreign ministerial meeting in Vientiane, Laos. It was clear that the meeting would be contentious, as the U.S. has continued to conduct provocative actions against China and Chinese industry, in spite of the agreements of the two Presidents in their Nov. 15, 2023 meeting on the sidelines of the APEC summit in San Francisco. In contrast to earlier meetings, no press was brought in for opening comments.
Wang Yi said that, in the past three months, the U.S. has not stopped its containment and suppression efforts of China, and has even intensified them. The threats facing Sino-U.S. relations are still accumulating, and the challenges are also rising, he said. Yet, it is still at a critical juncture of stopping the decline and stabilizing the relations. It is necessary to constantly calibrate the direction, manage risks, properly handle differences, eliminate interference, and promote cooperation.
While Wang reiterated that China will stay committed to the path of peaceful development and build a community with a shared future for mankind, he complained that the United States adheres to the wrong perception of China and always mirrors China with its own hegemonic logic. Wang said that China is not the United States, nor does it want to be. Rather, China does not seek hegemony or power politics, and it has the best record on peace and security as a major country in the world.