The United States and China are working to ensure the competition between them does not veer into conflict, a top White House official said Tuesday as the two sides started talks on a relationship that has been severely tested during President Joe Biden's term in office.
Jake Sullivan, the US national security adviser, is meeting over two days with Wang Yi, a senior foreign policy official for Chinese leader Xi Jinping, in a scenic lake area on the northern outskirts of Beijing.
“President Biden has been very clear in his conversations with President Xi that he is committed to managing this important relationship responsibly," Sullivan told Wang before the talks got underway.
The goal of his visit, which lasts through Thursday, is limited — to try to maintain communication in a relationship that broke down for the better part of a year in 2022-23 and was only nursed back over several months.
No major announcements are expected, though Sullivan's meetings could lay the groundwork for a possible final summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping before Biden steps down in January.
Wang, the director of the Communist Party’s Central Foreign Affairs Commission Office, noted that the China-US relationship has gone through twists and turns in the past few years.
“The key,” he said, “is to keep to the overall direction of mutual respect, peaceful co-existence, and win-win cooperation.”
According to Da Wei, a US and international relations expert at Tsinghua University in Beijing, it's important for the two countries to avoid any crisis in the remaining months of the Biden administration, as it could set the tone for US-China ties under the next one.
“The goal of this visit is not reaching new breakthroughs or progress but to continue the stable momentum of China-US relations in the past year through strategic communication, and to avoid new crises in the next few months,” he said.
The Biden administration has taken a tough line on China, viewing it as a strategic competitor, restricting the access of its companies to advanced technology and confronting the rising power as it seeks to exert influence over Taiwan and the South China Sea.
Already frosty relations went into a deep freeze after then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, a senior US lawmaker, visited Taiwan in August 2022. Hopes of restoring ties were dashed the following February when a suspected Chinese spy balloon drifted across the US before being shot down by the US military.
Sullivan has been Biden’s point person for often unannounced talks with Wang, who is the foreign minister as well as the ruling Communist Party’s top foreign policy official.
Wang had initially stepped down as foreign minister when he took the party post, a more senior position, but he returned about seven months later, in July 2023, after his successor was removed for reasons that have not been made public.
At a meeting between Sullivan and Wang in Vienna in May 2023, the two countries launched a delicate process of putting relations back on track. Since than, they have met two more times in a third country, Malta and Thailand. This week will mark their first talks in Beijing.
China's Foreign Ministry said this week that relations with the US remain at “a critical juncture.” It noted that the two sides are talking on climate and other issues, but it accused the US of continuing to constrain and suppress China.
Canada announced on Monday that it will match America's 100 per cent import tariff on Chinese-made electric vehicles, after being encouraged to do so by Sullivan during a meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Cabinet ministers the previous day.
