Editorial | Sullivan visit provides some welcome relief amid tense US-China ties
Presence of American national security adviser In Beijing for high-level talks proves positive with pledge to improve military communications
Relations between the United States and China have been marked by tensions for much of the past decade. Former president Donald Trump’s trade war has raged on under incumbent Joe Biden.
The US has bolstered regional security alliances in the Indo-Pacific to Beijing’s consternation. And ships from both navies patrol the South China Sea in close proximity, without an effective mechanism to help them pull back from the brink should a crisis erupt.
Against this backdrop, the results of a three-day visit by US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan to Beijing, at the invitation of Foreign Minister Wang Yi, can be viewed as a welcome relief.
On the final day, President Xi Jinping met Sullivan and said he hoped both sides would support each other’s development. Xi stressed that as major powers, China and the US “must be responsible to history, people and the world, and become a stable source of world peace and an accelerator of common development”.
Sullivan’s Beijing meetings aimed to pave the way for a possible summit between Xi and Biden, who steps down in January and is devoting much of the remainder of his term to foreign policy. The leaders last met in San Francisco in November.
