Beijing
—
Following last week’s high-stakes meeting between President Xi Jinping and President Donald Trump, China has urged the United States not to cross four delicate lines in order to get bilateral relations back on track.
Taiwan, democracy and human rights, political path and institutions, and the right to development are “China’s four red lines”, Chinese Ambassador to the United States Xie Feng said in a virtual address to American and Chinese businessmen in Shanghai on Monday.
“I hope the U.S. side will avoid causing trouble by crossing the border,” he said.
Mr. Xie’s comments came days after Mr. Xi and Mr. Trump held a landmark meeting last week on the sidelines of an international summit in South Korea, according to a statement released by the Chinese Embassy in the United States.
The meeting, the first between the two leaders since Trump returned to the White House earlier this year, is widely seen as an important step toward easing friction between the two superpowers.
Now, to get those relationships back on track, both sides need to “respect each other’s core interests and grave concerns,” Xie said, adding that the “urgent priority” is “following up on the agreement reached between the two presidents.”
“It would be unacceptable to say one thing and do another, to create new confusion, to make zero-sum calculations,” he said.
For the Chinese government, the four “red lines” elaborated by Mr. Xie represent long-standing sensitive areas that, if handled incorrectly, could inflame tensions. The most prominent of these is Taiwan, an autonomous democracy that China’s ruling Communist Party considers its own, even though it has never ruled it.
Beijing has long resented the informal relationship between the United States and Taipei, and Taipei frequently comes up in high-level diplomatic conversations between the two countries. President Trump told CBS’ 60 Minutes on Sunday that the topic did not come up in their meeting last week.
Beijing has in the past fiercely opposed U.S. efforts to interfere in China’s internal affairs, with U.S. officials raising concerns about restrictions on freedom of expression and alleged human rights abuses in China’s tightly controlled political system.
Trump administration figures like Secretary of State Marco Rubio have long been vocal about these issues, but Trump did not appear to raise them during his recent hour-and-40-minute meeting with Xi, which focused on bilateral economic relations.
Although these talks failed to result in a formal trade agreement, the Chinese government agreed to suspend for a year any drastic expansion of export restrictions on rare earth minerals, while the U.S. government similarly postponed measures to significantly expand the number of Chinese companies blacklisted from access to certain sensitive U.S. technologies.
The two countries also extended a ceasefire agreed earlier this year and lowered retaliatory tariffs from levels that amounted to a de facto embargo.
The move was greeted with a cry of relief by many in the global business community, who have been caught up in the uncertainty of the ebb and flow of economic tensions between the world’s two largest economies for months.
Xie, the Chinese government’s chief envoy in Washington, picked up on the trend in remarks on Monday, calling on business leaders to “build on the positive momentum” of the summit and “remain optimistic about China’s future and contribute to the Chinese market.”
