A senior US diplomat arrived in China yesterday for talks aimed at putting Sino-US relations back on track, with tensions high over US arms sales to Taiwan and a White House visit by the Dalai Lama.
US Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg will also focus on efforts to bring North Korea back to stalled nuclear disarmament negotiations, and try to persuade Beijing to back new sanctions against Iran over its atomic drive.
State Department spokesman Philip Crowley said Beijing and Washington needed to put aside their differences — over everything from Taiwan and Tibet to Internet freedom and the value of the yuan — to move forward.
“We’ve gone through a bit of a bumpy path here and I think there’s an interest, both within the United States and China, to get back to business as usual as quickly as possible,” Crowley told reporters on Monday.
Crowley said the visit offered an opportunity to “refocus on the future” of relations between the US and China, the world’s largest and third-largest economies.
But Steinberg faced a tough task, as Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang (秦剛) yesterday reiterated Beijing’s longstanding position that Washington was to blame for the array of problems in the trans-Pacific partnership.
“The responsibility for the current difficulty in China-US relations goes completely to the US side,” Qin told reporters. “We hope the US side takes the Chinese position seriously.”
Steinberg, who is accompanied by Jeffrey Bader, US President Barack Obama’s top Asia adviser on the National Security Council, will head to Tokyo tomorrow for talks with Japanese officials before heading home.
The US embassy in Beijing confirmed their arrival in China yesterday, without providing further details on their schedule.
When he took office in January last year, Obama promised to broaden the Sino-US relationship and in July he said their ties would “shape the 21st century.”
The US president made his maiden official visit to China with much fanfare in November.
But since then ties have faltered, with Beijing angry over the January approval of a US$6.4 billion arms package to Taiwan and Obama’s meeting last month at the White House with the Dalai Lama.
Sino-US ties have also been affected by Internet giant Google’s threats to pull out of the emerging Asian market over cyberattacks and government web censorship, and a variety of trade and currency issues.
“We have a very broad, deep, complex relationship with China. There are many areas where we have achieved a consensus view. North Korea would be a great example of that,” Crowley said.
“There are some areas where we do not yet have a convergent view. Iran might be an example of that,” he added, noting that both subjects were on Steinberg’s agenda in Beijing.
The six-party talks on ending North Korea’s nuclear weapons drive, hosted by China, have faltered since Pyongyang stormed out in April last year, a month before staging a second nuclear test.
Pyongyang says it cannot return until UN sanctions are lifted and it receives a US commitment to discuss a formal peace pact, replacing the armistice which ended the 1950-1953 war on the Korean peninsula.
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