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The United States and China are hurtling toward inevitable “confrontation and conflict” unless Washington changes course, Beijing’s new foreign minister warned Tuesday.
The fiery comments from Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang underlined the deepening tensions between the world’s two largest economies in the wake of the surveillance balloon saga and Russia’s war in Ukraine.
They echoed similarly sharp remarks a day earlier by China’s leader, Xi Jinping, blaming U.S. efforts to contain China for deteriorating relations and suggesting Beijing would increasingly seek to push back.
Qin’s news conference, his first since taking office in December, took place in Beijing on the sidelines of the annual meeting of China’s rubber-stamp legislature, where Xi is expected to complete the biggest government reshuffle in a decade.
In a wide-ranging rebuke of U.S. policies, Qin — who until recently was the Chinese ambassador to the U.S. — questioned President Joe Biden’s assertion that the U.S. seeks competition with China but not conflict.
“In fact, the U.S. side’s so-called competition is all-round containment and suppression, a zero-sum game,” he said, suggesting that conflict may be unavoidable unless Washington stops trying to suppress Beijing.
“The U.S. side supposedly wants to put ‘guardrails’ on Sino-U.S. relations and not to clash,” Qin continued. “In fact it wants China not to respond in words or action when slandered or attacked. That is just impossible.”
“If the U.S. side does not put on the brakes and continues down the wrong path, no amount of guardrails can stop the derailment and rollover into confrontation and conflict,” he said.
In a speech to political delegates on Monday, Xi also accused the U.S. of trying to fence China in.
“Western countries led by the United States have implemented all-round containment, encirclement and suppression of China, which has brought unprecedented severe challenges to our country’s development,” he said according to Xinhua, China’s state-run news agency.
Qin also criticized Washington’s decision early last month to shoot down a suspected Chinese spy balloon off the coast of South Carolina, repeating Beijing’s insistence that it appeared over U.S. territory by accident.
“The U.S. side violated the spirit of international law and international practice by making presumptions of guilt, overreacting, abusing force, and making use of the issue to create a diplomatic crisis that could have been avoided,” he said.
On Taiwan, the self-ruling island that Beijing claims as its territory, Qin said it was the first red line in China’s relations with the U.S., which is Taiwan’s most important international backer.
“The U.S. bears unshirkable responsibility for the creation of the Taiwan issue,” he said.
Qin said the U.S. had disrespected China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity by providing defensive weapons to the island, which Beijing has said it could take by force if necessary, even as the U.S. warns China not to supply arms to Russia for its war against Ukraine.
China and Russia declared a “no limits” partnership weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine a year ago, and China has tried to appear neutral in the conflict, refraining from condemning Russian aggression or even calling it an invasion. Qin said Tuesday that China-Russia relations “must move steadily forward” as the world becomes more turbulent.
But Beijing strongly denies U.S. allegations that it is considering providing Moscow with ammunition and artillery to aid its fight against Kyiv.
“China is neither the creator of the crisis nor a party to it, nor has it provided weapons to any party to the conflict, so why should China be blamed, sanctioned, pressured or even threatened?” Qin said.
He repeated earlier calls for a negotiated solution to the Ukraine conflict, though a 12-point peace proposal that Beijing issued last month was quickly dismissed by Western officials as too favorable to Russia.
“It is regrettable that efforts to persuade and promote talks have been undermined,” Qin said, “as if an invisible hand is pushing the conflict to escalate, taking advantage of the Ukrainian crisis to achieve certain geopolitical intentions.”
