G7 summit statement will take aim at ‘challenge China poses’, US national security adviser says

Beijing’s non-market economic practices, approach to debt and human rights actions set to be addressed in communique issued from meeting in Germany

‘We’re not looking for a Cold War, and we’re not looking to divide the world into rival blocs,’ adds Jake Sullivan, noting another Xi-Biden dialogue looms

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US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in April. Sullivan is accompanying US President Joe Biden this week to attend meetings of the G7 and Nato. Photo: AFP

Published: 2:10am, 28 Jun 2022Updated: 3:34am, 28 Jun 2022

US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan has warned the statement coming out of this week’s G7 summit will take aim at China, yet stressed that Western nations sought neither confrontation with Beijing nor to divide the world into rival blocs.

Sullivan made the comments during his trip to Germany with US President Joe Biden as they attended a three-day Group of Seven summit that began on Sunday, ahead of a trip to Spain for a Nato meeting.

“[W]e do think that there is increasing convergence, both at the G7 and at Nato, around the challenge China poses and around the need – the urgent need for consultation and especially alignment among the world’s leading market democracies to deal with some of those challenges,” Sullivan said on Monday.

In particular, the expected G7 communique would address China’s “non-market economic practices, its approach to debt and its human rights actions”, he said, while the Nato strategic concept would address China in “ways that are unprecedented”. The strategic concept is a document guiding the transatlantic security alliance’s political, military and defence developments.

Biden’s wish to align allies and “like-minded countries” to counter Chinese influence has been central to his foreign policy. But Beijing has taken exception to what it sees as an effort to “smear” China, responding to the G7 by asserting the “days when a small group of countries decided the fate of the world are long gone”.

On the first day of the G7 summit on Sunday, Biden announced plans to raise US$600 billion for a G7 initiative – the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment – to blunt China’s global influence through its Belt and Road Initiative, which focuses on building infrastructure in developing nations.

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