In his virtual summit with US President Joe Biden in November, President Xi Jinping expressed his willingness to build consensus and take active steps to move China-US relations forward based on the principles of mutual respect, peaceful coexistence and win-win cooperation.
Biden, too, struck a positive note saying that the US does not seek to change China’s system or seek confrontation with China, and it upholds its commitment to the one-China principle.
Yet while China has sought to improve relations since then by always looking at the larger picture, Washington has made little effort to hold true to Biden’s words.
The US has continued to rally support from its allies and to confront China on many strategic and economic fronts with the aim of containing China’s development, and it has frequently made waves in the Taiwan Straits and breached its commitment to the one-China policy.
Thanks to the discrepancies between what the US leader has said and what his administration is actually doing, cooperation between the two countries has stalled. Such an undesirable state of affairs can neither contribute to the development of bilateral ties nor the addressing of pressing global issues.
From climate change to denuclearization to the Ukraine crisis, there are many challenges on which the US and China could and should coordinate their stances.
As such, China-US relations go far beyond bilateral scope. It was therefore good to hear Monday’s “intense” seven-hour talks between top Chinese diplomat Yang Jiechi and US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan in Rome described as candid, in-depth and constructive.
Despite the two countries’ troubled relations amid the increasingly complicated international environment, the meeting showed the two sides’ willingness to maintain open lines of communication.
More encouraging still, they reportedly agreed on the need to increase mutual understanding, manage differences, expand consensus and strengthen cooperation, so as to navigate their relations onto a sound and steady development course. Whether the two sides can properly handle their differences and deepen cooperation will have a direct impact on the two countries and the world at large.
With the fighting still raging, Yang and Sullivan discussed the situation in Ukraine. Whether or not they can find some common ground on the issue is being widely viewed as a touchstone of whether China and the US, as the two largest economies in the world, can work together to play a bigger role in promoting global stability.
China-US cooperation may not solve all the problems, but few problems can be solved without China-US cooperation. Washington should abandon its attempts to reanimate the follies of the Cold War and work together with Beijing to promote peace and development.
Editorial, China Daily
