By Liz Lee
BEIJING (Reuters) – China’s top security agency has hinted that any meeting between President Xi Jinping and US President Joe Biden in San Francisco later this year will depend on whether the United States will “show sufficient sincerity”.
Biden expressed disappointment on Sunday that Xi was not attending an upcoming summit of G20 leaders in India, but added that he was “going to meet” him.
Biden didn’t elaborate, but the next likely opportunity for Biden to hold talks with Xi as the two countries try to stabilize troubled relations is an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in San Francisco in November.
“To really make ‘from Bali to San Francisco’ a reality, the United States needs to show enough sincerity,” the State Security Department said in a post Monday on social media page WeChat.
It referred to the last meeting between Biden and Xi on the sidelines of a G20 summit on the Indonesian holiday island of Bali last November. It made no mention of the APEC summit in its message.
It is unclear whether the ministry, China’s main intelligence agency, is aware of or has influence over Xi’s considerations on diplomatic relations.
This weekend, Prime Minister Li Qiang will lead a delegation to a G20 summit in New Delhi, the Chinese government has announced, but virtually confirms that Xi will not attend.
The ministry said in its post that Biden’s administration had adopted a two-pronged strategy on China, inviting competition with China but also seeking to control competition.
While U.S. officials who recently visited China said there was no intention to curb or “decouple” Chinese development, the U.S. still approved arms sales and provided military funding to Taiwan, and raised issues about Tibet and the South China Sea, but also openly. criticism of the Chinese economy.
“China will never let its guard down because of a few ‘nice words’ from the United States… The various obstacles, containment and repression by the United States will only make China more courageous and self-reliant,” said the Ministry of State Security. said.
US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, who visited China last week, said the United States did not want to disengage from China, but also said US companies had complained to her that China had become “uninvestable”, pointing to fines, raids and other actions that have made it risky to do business in the world’s second largest economy.
China reiterated calls for the United States to take more “practical and useful measures” to preserve China-US ties after the “uninvestable” comment was reported.
(Reporting by Liz Lee; editing by Robert Birsel)
