Risk of open conflict in tests to US-China ties, Tillerson warns

Relations between the United States and China have reached “a pivot point”, Rex Tillerson has warned, calling for efforts to avoid “open conflict” between the world’s two biggest economies.

At a rare state department briefing on Tuesday, the US secretary of state said ties were at a crossroads after “a long period of no conflict” that had lasted more than four decades.

Tillerson said the question now was: “How should we define this relationship [with China] and how do we ensure that economic prosperity to the benefit of both countries and the world can continue, and that where we have differences – because we will have differences, we do have differences – that we will deal with those differences in a way that does not lead to open conflict?

“We test this relationship through things like the situation in North Korea,” he went on, referring to Donald Trump’s so far fruitless attempts to persuade Beijing to help rein in Kim Jong-un.

“Can we work together to address this global threat where we have a common objective? And where we have differences – in the South China Sea, and we have some trading differences that need to be addressed – can we work through those differences in a way without it leading to open conflict and find the solutions that are necessary to serve us both?”

Orville Schell, the head of the centre on US-China relations at New York’s Asia Society, said Tillerson’s comments were “a polite way of saying that we are increasingly estranged”. After decades of US engagement with the world’s most populous nation after the re-establishment of ties by Richard Nixon and Mao Zedong in 1972, “now there are a number of signals that suggest we may be ineluctably on diverging paths”.