Competition should not lead to conflict, Joe Biden tells Xi Jinping
The Hindu
Their phone call was only the second between the two leaders, and the first time they have spoken since February.
U.S. President Joe Biden told his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping on September 10 that both countries needed “to ensure competition does not veer into conflict” as they grapple with a growing list of differences. The phone call was only the second between the two leaders, and the first time they have spoken since February, not long after Mr. Biden’s inauguration. The months since have seen both sides clash on a number of issues, starting with a war-of-words that played out in public when in March in what was the first significant engagement with Beijing by the new administration. The differences range from human rights issues in Hong Kong and Xinjiang and the Taiwan question to the COVID-19 origins investigation and now the crisis in Afghanistan. The rancorous U.S-China relationship under former President Donald Trump has broadly carried over into the new administration, which has said it would compete with China when it needed to, but also wanted to cooperate on some issues such as climate change. China, in contrast, has said that cooperation could not take place on issues while the broader relationship remained confrontational, described this month by Foreign Minister Wang Yi as a situation where “if an oasis is surrounded by deserts, then sooner or later the oasis will be desertified.”More Related News