China ready to improve ties if US is willing, says Foreign Minister Wang Yi

Name: Are Xi Jinping’s China and Donald Trump’s US destined for armed conflict?
Uploaded: 2020-07-09T05:05:00.000Z
Duration: 4 min 12 s
Description: Are Xi Jinping’s China and Donald Trump’s US destined for armed conflict?

Wang cites ‘the most serious challenges in 40 years of relations’ and is the most senior Chinese official in months to advocate warmer ties

Minister suggests drawing lists to identify areas where the two countries can cooperate, disputes that could be resolved and ones that cannot

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Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said lists could be made of resolvable and unresolvable differences. Photo: EPA-EFE

Teddy Ng

Published: 1:05pm, 9 Jul 2020Updated: 2:25pm, 11 Jul 2020

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi has called for reconciliation between China and the United States, following months of escalating confrontations between the two that have left their relations in the most serious jeopardy for four decades.

Wang became the most senior Chinese official in recent months to voice a more positive message for ties between the two, stressing that China would not displace the US as a superpower, and suggesting three lists that he said could identify and resolve disputes.

The reconciliation message followed months of sabre-rattling and rising calls for a decoupling of the two nations, and after top diplomats from both sides laid out the sticking points in their disputes in high-level talks in Hawaii last month.

In those talks, China’s top diplomat Yang Jiechi expressed Chinese frustrations over Washington’s actions concerning Hong Kong, Xinjiang and Taiwan to US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

04:12

Are Xi Jinping’s China and Donald Trump’s US destined for armed conflict?

“What is alarming is that the Sino-US relationship is one of the most important bilateral relations in the world, but is facing the most serious challenges since the establishment of diplomatic relations [in 1979],” Wang said in a speech in Beijing on Thursday.

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