China’s Wang Yi urges US to open talks with North Korea

China has urged the US to seize on the thaw between North and South Korea by opening talks with Pyongyang.

‘It takes more than one cold day to freeze three feet of ice’: Wang Yi at his yearly press conference in Beijing yesterday. Picture: AP

China yesterday urged Washington to seize on the thaw between North and South Korea to offer “sooner rather than later” talks with Pyongyang.

At his annual press conference in Beijing, Foreign Minister Wang Yi highlighted the ambitious diplomatic role being played by President Xi Jinping, who will step up his travels to advance his new concept of global governance. He confirmed that Mr Xi, who has visited 57 countries since becoming leader five years ago, intended to attend the APEC leaders’ summit in Papua New Guinea in November.

Mr Wang rejected claims China was exercising “sharp power” internationally. He said for decades the West had said China was either collapsing or threatening. Those who suggested the former were becoming “an international laughing stock”.

The Chinese economy was contributing more to global economic growth than the US, Europe and Japan together, and its poverty reduction has become “a miracle in human history”.

It was time that “the China threat theory is also laid to rest”.

In reference to the Indo-Pacific grouping of the US, Australia, Japan and India he said it seemed there was “never a shortage of headline-grabbing ideas” that soon disappeared.

Mr Wang said that the four nations all denied the grouping was intended to target any other country. “I hope they mean what they say, and that the action matches the rhetoric,” he said. He compared it with China’s Belt and Road Initiative which now had the support, he claimed, of 100 countries. “The idea of a new Cold War is out of synch with our times,” he said.

It was “fundamentally wrong” to believe China was a strategic competitor with the US, wanting to replace Washington as the dominant world power. China’s path, he said, was one of “peaceful development,” including through playing a major role at the UN.

He said the Korean issue was “the hottest topic in the world today” and praised the North and South for using the Winter Olympics to “accelerate a rapid thaw in their relations”. Mr Wang claimed on behalf of China credit for the thaw, which he said resulted from Beijing’s encouragement of the suspension of nuclear or missile tests by the North and of joint military exercises with the US by the South. This was “the right prescription,” he said.

It was vital that the initial steps were followed and a peace mechanism established for the Korean peninsula. “All must demonstrate political courage,” he said.

He welcomed cautiously Seoul’s announcement that Pyongyang had offered to hold denuclearisation talks with the US in return for security guarantees. “Of course it takes more than one cold day to freeze three feet of ice. Despite light at the end of the tunnel, the journey ahead won’t be smooth. History has reminded us time and again that whenever tensions subsided on the peninsula the situation would be clouded by various interferences,” Mr Wang warned.