Foreign Minister Qin Kang at a session of the Chinese Parliament on March 7, 2023.
Beijing – The United States should change its “flawed” policy towards China or face to “conflict and confrontation”. According to the Reuters agency, Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Kang said this today at a press conference held on the sidelines of the Chinese Parliament session. He also repeated Beijing's call for dialogue to end the conflict in Ukraine.
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“The American perception of China is distorted. The United States considers China to be the main rival and the most serious geopolitical challenge,” Qin said, according to which “US-China relations have completely deviated from a reasonable direction.” The US is trying to contain and suppress China instead of competing with it in a healthy way, Chin said.
Relations between Washington and Beijing have long been strained over a number of issues, including democratically-ruled Taiwan, which China considers a province, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which the Chinese government has refused to condemn, and trade issues. Recently, US-China relations have further deteriorated after the US shot down a balloon off its coast, which the US says was part of a vast Chinese aerial espionage program. China criticized the move, saying it was a civilian balloon meant for meteorological observation.
Regarding the war in Ukraine, today the Chinese head of diplomacy made accusations of trying to escalate the conflict, but he did not directly name any country as the culprit. “The invisible hand is using the Ukrainian crisis to serve a certain geopolitical agenda,” said Chin and again appealed for a solution to the conflict through negotiations.
Chinese President Xi Jinping has held talks with the Russian Federation several times since the Russian invasion of Ukraine last February. President Vladimir Putin, but he has not yet spoken to his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky. That fact contradicts claims that China maintains a neutral stance, Ukraine's chargé d'affaires in Beijing Zhanna Leshchynska said on the anniversary of the invasion.
US officials have also recently warned that Beijing is considering providing military aid to Moscow, including weapons and ammunition. China calls these claims a smear campaign.
Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Kang said today that China must develop its relations with Russia as the situation in the world is becoming more and more uneasy. The meetings between the Chinese and Russian presidents are a support for mutual relations, he added.
