China’s new ambassador to US meets Pentagon official, urging Washington to ‘remove obstacles’ impeding military relations
- Talks may have been effort by Beijing to address Washington’s complaints about the suspension of high-level talks between the two countries’ armed forces
- Ambassador Xie Feng tells Pentagon’s Ely Ratner US must ‘prudently handle important issues such as the Taiwan question’ to resume military-to-military ties
The Chinese embassy in Washington said Xie had been invited to meet Ely Ratner, the US assistant secretary of defence for Indo-Pacific security affairs, and he had urged the US to “remove obstacles and manage differences with concrete actions”.
The statement added that Washington must “prudently handle important issues such as the Taiwan question” in order “to bring state-to-state and [military-to-military] relations back on track”.
Citing a brief statement from US Defence Department spokesperson, Lieutenant Colonel Martin Meiners, Bloomberg and Reuters reported that Xie and Ratner, discussed a “range of international and regional security concerns”.
Ratner emphasised the importance of keeping open lines of military communications between the two countries, which have been virtually non-existent since then-House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan last August – something Beijing regarded as a serious breach of its sovereignty.