The meeting between U.S. and Chinese officials led the former to appear “defensive,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said.
National security adviser Jake Sullivan, who described the conversations he and Blinken had with China’s foreign policy chief Yang Jiechi and the country’s state councilor Wang Yi as “tough and direct,” reportedly said they discussed “a wide range of issues” and were able to “lay out priorities and intentions and hear from the Chinese side their priorities and intentions.”
“We certainly know and knew going in that there are a number of areas where we are fundamentally at odds, including China’s actions in Xinjiang, with regard to Hong Kong, Tibet, increasingly Taiwan, as well as actions it is taking in cyberspace,” Blinken said, speaking to reporters after the last session of talks wrapped on Friday. “It’s no surprise that when we raised those issues clearly and directly, we got a defensive response. But we were also able to have a very candid conversation over these many hours on an expansive agenda.”
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The conversations got tense at times.
Yang criticized the United States during the opening press conference, saying that “the United States does not have the qualification to say that it wants to speak to China from a position of strength,” that his country has “Chinese-style democracy,” and 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.”
The comment spurred a rebuke by both Blinken and Sullivan.
“I’m hearing deep satisfaction that the United States is back, that we’re reengaged with our allies and partners,” Blinken responded. “I’m also hearing deep concern about some of the actions your government has taken, and we’ll have an opportunity to discuss those when we get down to work.”
President Biden was “proud” of how Blinken handled the meeting on Friday, he said.
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“I’m very proud of the secretary of state,” the president told reporters on the South Lawn.
It has been a somewhat tumultuous time for foreign policy in the White House. The Kremlin rebuked Biden this week for calling Russian President Vladimir Putin a “killer.”
“When I was a child, when we argued in the courtyard, we said the following: ‘If you call someone names, that’s really your name,’” Putin responded. “When we characterize other people, or even when we characterize other states, other people, it is always as though we are looking in the mirror.”
