High-level talks between U.S. and China end in a "stalemate"

Hong Kong — A meeting of high-level diplomats from the United States and China ended in what Chinese officials called a "stalemate" on Monday, cooling near-term hopes for a major summit between U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese president Xi Jinping.

U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, the most senior Biden administration official to visit China to date, met with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Vice Foreign Minister Xie Feng in the port city of Tianjin. But China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs blasted Washington with a salvo of six statements that accused the U.S. government of trying to "contain and suppress" China, attacked the U.S. as the "inventor of coercive diplomacy," and alleged that the root of the deadlock between the world's two biggest economies was because some Americans see China as "an imagined enemy." During Monday's meeting, Beijing also delivered a list of demands to Washington, which included the unconditional lifting of visa restrictions on Chinese Communist Party members and an end to the labeling of Chinese media as "foreign missions," a designation from the Trump White House aimed to make a distinction between propaganda and free press. The list was the top trending topic on China's Twitter-like social media platform Weibo, with 85 million views by early evening Monday.