China/US: Stop treating us as the enemy, Beijing tells America

China has accused the US of treating it as an ‘imaginary enemy’ to distract from its domestic struggles during another fractious meeting between top diplomats.

US President Joe Biden, left, and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

China has accused the United States of treating it as an “imaginary enemy” to distract from its domestic struggles during another fractious meeting between senior diplomats.

The encounter in Tianjin was the first high-level, face-to-face diplomatic meeting between the countries since an acrimonious exchange in Anchorage in March, when Beijing criticised Washington for “condescension and hypocrisy”. American officials accused the Chinese of threatening the rules-based international order.

Even before the Tianjin meeting began, Xie Feng, a vice-foreign minister, said that China would “teach the US a lesson” on how it treated other countries. He later told Wendy Sherman, the US deputy secretary of state, that the main reason for the stalemate in relations was that “some Americans portray China as an ‘imaginary enemy’ ”.

“For quite some time, when talking about conflict with China and challenges facing the US, the ‘Pearl Harbour moment’ and the ‘Sputnik moment’ have been brought up by some Americans,” Xie said, according to a statement released by China’s foreign ministry.

“What does it imply? Some international scholars, including some US academics, perceive this as comparing China to Japan in the Second World War and the Soviet Union in the Cold War. It seems as if by making China an ‘imagined enemy’, a national sense of purpose would be reignited in the US.

“The hope may be that by demonising China, the US could somehow shift domestic discontent over political, economic and social issues and blame China for its own structural problems.”

A Secret Service agent guards his post on the roof of the White House as a lamp post is adorned with Chinese and US national flags in Washington, DC.

Sherman is the highest-ranking US official to visit China since President Biden took office in January. She also met Wang Yi, the Chinese foreign minister, and said that she “spoke about the United States’s commitment to healthy competition, protecting human rights and democratic values”. The US State Department said that Sherman had raised China’s violations of human rights in Hong Kong, in Xinjiang - home of the Uighurs - and in Tibet.

“The deputy secretary and state councillor Wang had a frank and open discussion about a range of issues, demonstrating the importance of maintaining open lines of communication between our two countries,” it said.

“The deputy secretary underscored that the United States welcomes the stiff competition between our countries - and that we intend to continue to strengthen our own competitive hand - but that we do not seek conflict.”

Relations have become tense and sometimes hostile over issues such as cyberattacks, military threats over the self-governed island of Taiwan, persecution of the Uighurs, the crackdown on dissent in Hong Kong and the militarisation of the South China Sea.

The Biden administration has confronted Beijing while seeking co-operation on climate change. “Our relationship with China will be competitive when it should be, collaborative when it can be and adversarial when it must be,” Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, has said. The Chinese government has said there is no compromise on matters involving state sovereignty and territorial integrity.

Before yesterday’s (Monday’s) meetings Beijing said that it would “never accept any country that claims to be superior to others”. Xie told Sherman that the US was in no position to lecture China on democracy and human rights, citing America’s 600,000 coronavirus deaths.

Xie also called US rhetoric of competitive, collaborative and adversarial relations “a thinly veiled attempt to contain and suppress China”.

THE TIMES