US China “Positive Meeting”
Kuala Lumpur, Jul 11 (EFE).-
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Friday that he had a “very productive, positive” meeting with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi that could stabilize bilateral relations amid trade tensions and disagreements over the Ukraine war.
“It was a very productive meeting. It wasn’t a negotiation; it was a positive meeting. And it’s important that the United States and China have productive meetings and regular engagement and communication,” Rubio told reporters after his first meeting with his Chinese counterpart since taking office in January.
The US secretary of state, who, like Wang Yi, participated in the Southeast Asian bloc ASEAN meetings in Kuala Lumpur this week, described the meeting as “very constructive.”
“Hopefully they will be able to build on that, to continue to bring stability to our relationship,” he added.
He also said that Washington would look for a suitable date for US President Donald Trump to visit China, without giving any indication of when that might be.
“President Trump has been invited to visit China. It’s a visit he wants to undertake, and so we’ll work on finding the right date for that. But I’m sure it will happen because both presidents (Trump and Xi Jinping) want it to happen,” Rubio said.
Trump already said in early June that Xi had invited him to visit the country during a telephone conversation they had at the time, which focused almost exclusively on the trade war and which he described as very positive.
The meeting between Rubio and Wang comes after the two countries reached a trade agreement in London at the end of June that included, according to Trump, the imposition of a 55 percent US tariff on Chinese products and a 10 percent tariff on American goods by Beijing.
On Thursday, Rubio told the media in Kuala Lumpur that he was seeking a meeting with Wang to discuss China’s support for Russia in the war in Ukraine, amid an increase in airstrikes launched by Moscow, an issue he made no reference to after his meeting with the Chinese minister.
Both Rubio and Wang held a bilateral meeting on Thursday with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who also attended the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) meeting.
The self-governed island of Taiwan, to which the US supplies arms and which China has not ruled out invading, and tensions in the South China Sea are other stumbling blocks between the major powers. EFE sn-pav-mca/pd
