US top diplomat: China acting more ‘repressively, aggressively’

Antony Blinken says United States’s goal is not to contain China but to uphold the international rules-based order.

An increasingly powerful China is challenging the world order, acting “more repressively” at home and “more aggressively” overseas as it tests its growing influence, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said, in an interview on US television. “What we’ve witnessed over the last several years is China acting more repressively at home and more aggressively abroad. That is a fact,” Blinken said in an interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes on Sunday. The top diplomat in the United States said China was behaving “increasingly in adversarial ways” but asked whether Washington was heading towards a military confrontation with Beijing, Blinken replied: “It’s profoundly against the interests of both China and the United States to, to get to that point, or even to head in that direction.”