China has called for the US to avoid crossing four sensitive “red lines” in order to keep the two countries’ relations on track following a high-stakes meeting between leaders Xi Jinping and Donald Trump last week.
Taiwan, democracy and human rights, political path and system, and right to development are “China’s four red lines,” China’s ambassador to the US Xie Feng said during a virtual address to American and Chinese businesspeople in Shanghai on Monday.
“We hope the US side will avoid crossing them and causing trouble,” he said.
Xie made the remarks to an event hosted by the US-China Business Council, according to a readout released by the Chinese Embassy in the US, in comments that come days after Xi and Trump held their landmark meeting last week on the sidelines of an international summit in South Korea.
Those talks – the leaders’ first since Trump’s return to the White House earlier this year – have been widely seen as a significant step in de-escalating frictions between the two superpowers.
Now, keeping those relations on track would require both sides to “respect each other’s core interests and major concerns,” said Xie, adding that the “pressing priority” was “to follow up on the consensus reached between the two presidents.”
“It would be unacceptable to say one thing but do another, cause any new disruption, make zero-sum calculations,” he said.
For Beijing, the four “red lines” elaborated by Xie are longstanding sensitive areas that could enflame tensions if mishandled – the most prominent of which is Taiwan, the self-governing democracy that China’s ruling Communist Party views as its own, despite never having controlled it.
Beijing has long been irked by Washington’s unofficial relationship with Taipei, and the island often features in high-level diplomatic conversations between the two sides. Trump on Sunday told CBS’ 60 Minutes that the subject did not arise during the meeting last week.
Beijing has in the past bristled at what it sees as US efforts to interfere in China’s domestic affairs, including American officials voicing concerns about limits to freedoms of expression within China’s tightly controlled political system and alleged human rights violations.
While figures within the Trump administration like US Secretary of State Marco Rubio have long been vocal around such issues, they did not appear to be raised by Trump during the recent hour-and-forty-minute meeting with Xi, which focused on their bilateral economic relationship.
Those talks ended without a formal trade deal, but saw Beijing agree to pause for a year a sweeping expansion of its export controls on rare earth minerals, while Washington would similarly defer measures that would have vastly expanded the number of Chinese firms blacklisted from accessing certain sensitive US technologies.
The two sides also extended a truce reached earlier this year that brought down their tit-for-tat tariffs from levels that would have amounted to a de facto trade embargo.
The measures were greeted with relief by many in the global business community, which for months has been ensnared in the uncertainty of up-and-down economic frictions between the world’s two largest economies.
Xie, Beijing’s top envoy in Washington, picked up that thread in his remarks on Monday, as he called on business leaders to “build on the positive momentum” of the summit and “remain optimistic about China’s future and committed to the Chinese market.”
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