Foreign Minister Wang Yi: U.S. ‘obsessed’ with suppressing China

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said the United States was “obsessed” with suppressing China, potentially jeopardizing efforts to improve bilateral relations.

BEIJING — China’s foreign minister said Thursday that the United States was “obsessed” with suppressing China, potentially jeopardizing efforts to strengthen relations between the world’s two biggest economies.

Relations fell to their lowest point in decades last year amid disputes over tech, trade, human rights, the status of Taiwan, an alleged Chinese spy balloon shot down over the U.S., and Beijing’s position on wars in Ukraine and the Middle East.

Foreign Minister Wang Yi said there had been “some improvements” in U.S.-China relations since Presidents Joe Biden and Xi Jinping held a summit in California in November, their first encounter in a year. But the U.S. still has misperceptions about China and is seeking to restrict its development, Wang said, with the list of unilateral sanctions on Chinese tech and other companies “reaching bewildering levels of unfathomable absurdity.”

“If the United States says one thing and does another, where is its credibility as a major country?” he said at a wide-ranging news conference in Beijing on the sidelines of the annual meeting of China’s rubber-stamp legislature. “If it gets jittery every time it hears the word ‘China,’ where is its confidence as a major country?”

“The challenges the U.S. faces lie within itself, not in China,” Wang continued, noting that this year is the 45th anniversary of the establishment of formal U.S.-China relations. “If the United States is obsessed with suppressing China, it will eventually harm itself.”

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/china-wang-yi-us-relations-rcna142188

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