After meeting with six of the world’s wealthiest nations, President Joe Biden defended his administration’s push to target China in a Group of Seven communique that called out human rights abuses in Xinjiang, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, China’s “debt diplomacy,” and urged a fresh investigation of the coronavirus’s origins.
It was the first time in three years that a joint statement by the seven leaders, issued as the cohort wrapped up its first in-person summit since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, had mentioned China.
“China has to start to act responsibly in terms of international norms on human rights and transparency. Transparency matters across the board,” Biden told reporters during a Sunday press conference in Cornwall, England, his second as president and first overseas.
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When asked what the United States argued among the leaders of the seven industrialized nations to shift the group’s public tone, Biden said the group needed to act together to counter China’s influence, including on smaller nations’ economies.
“There’s no way to answer that without sounding self-serving,” he said. “I just laid out the need to be consistent to protect our economies and to see to it that other struggling economies … were not being held captive.”
“You might ask that to others,” he added. “I’m not trying to be a wise guy.”
Ahead of the group’s Sunday statement, leaders discussed “some of the ideas and efforts around both the cooperative elements, the competitive elements, the adversarial elements of the relationship with China, and [how to] turn those into something more than just words,” a senior administration official said.
Biden “made a forceful — some forceful comments about kind of putting values and actions [and] call some of those things out publicly,” the official said of the “adversarial elements” of a relationship with China, including on “forced labor” in Xinjiang.
“That was some of the space where there was some interesting discussions and a little bit of a differentiation of opinion on not whether, kind of, the threat is there, but on how strong, from an action perspective, I think different G-7 members are willing to take things,” he added.
The final message was not as strong as the U.S. had wanted and did not mention China specifically in remarks on forced labor, or refer to Uyghurs directly, with leaders of Germany and Italy objecting to language on forced labor by the Muslim minority in China’s Xinjiang province, according to reports.
Still, Biden said on Sunday, “I’m satisfied.”
The president also argued that the world was still awaiting access to China’s laboratories, one of two suspected origins for COVID-19, needed to prevent a future pandemic.
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“We haven’t had access,” Biden said. “Our intelligence community is not certain whether or not this was a consequence of a marketplace interfacing with animals and the environment … or whether it was an experiment gone awry in a laboratory. It’s important to know the answer to that.”
