China’s new foreign minister warns of conflict with US

• China’s new foreign minister Qin Gang warned that unless Washington alters course.
• The two countries are headed for an unavoidable “confrontation and conflict”.
• Unless Washington stops trying to suppress Beijing.

Unless Washington alters course, the two countries are headed for an unavoidable “confrontation and conflict,” China’s new foreign minister said on Tuesday.

Following the controversy surrounding the surveillance balloons and Russia’s war in Ukraine, the vehement remarks from China’s foreign minister Qin Gang highlighted the rising tensions between the two greatest economies in the world.

They echoed equally acerbic remarks made by China’s leader, Xi Jinping, the day before, in which he blamed deteriorating relations on U.S. efforts to control China and predicted Beijing would try to push back more frequently.

At the annual gathering of China’s rubber-stamp legislature, where Xi is anticipated to complete the largest cabinet upheaval in a decade, Qin held his first news conference since entering office in December.

Qin, who until recently served as China’s ambassador to the United States, questioned President Joe Biden’s claim that the United States wants rivalry with China but not confrontation in a broad critique of American policy.

“In fact, the U.S. side’s so-called competition is all-round containment and suppression, a zero-sum game,” he said, suggesting that conflict may be unavoidable unless Washington stops trying to suppress Beijing.

“The U.S. side supposedly wants to put ‘guardrails’ on Sino-U.S. relations and not to clash,” Qin continued. “In fact it wants China not to respond in words or action when slandered or attacked.

That is just impossible.”

“If the U.S. side does not put on the brakes and continues down the wrong path, no amount of guardrails can stop the derailment and rollover into confrontation and conflict,” he said.

Xi also claimed that the U.S. was attempting to contain China in a speech he gave to party delegates on Monday.

“Western countries led by the United States have implemented all-round containment, encirclement and suppression of China, which has brought unprecedented severe challenges to our country’s development,” he said according to Xinhua, China’s state-run news agency.

In addition, Qin condemned Washington’s choice to shoot down a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon early last month off the coast of South Carolina, despite Beijing’s assertion that it had accidentally flown over American land.

“The U.S. side violated the spirit of international law and international practice by making presumptions of guilt, overreacting, abusing force, and making use of the issue to create a diplomatic crisis that could have been avoided,” he said.

The self-governing island of Taiwan, which Beijing claims as its own, is the first area where China and the United States will not cooperate, according to Qin.

The United States is Taiwan’s main foreign supporter.

“The U.S. bears unshrinkable responsibility for the creation of the Taiwan issue,” he said.

Qin claimed that the United States had disregarded China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity by giving the island defensive weapons, which Beijing has threatened to seize by force if necessary, even as the United States cautions China against giving Russia weapons for its conflict with Ukraine.

Weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine a year ago, China and Russia made a “no limits” alliance public. Since then, China has attempted to project an image of neutrality in the crisis by declining to denounce Russian aggression or even to refer to it as an invasion.

China-Russian relations “must move gradually forward,” according to Qin, as the globe grows increasingly unstable, he said on Tuesday.

China, meanwhile, vehemently refutes American allegations that it is considering giving Moscow weapons and artillery to support its conflict with Kyiv.

“China is neither the creator of the crisis nor a party to it, nor has it provided weapons to any party to the conflict, so why should China be blamed, sanctioned, pressured or even threatened?” Qin said.

He reiterated prior demands for a negotiated settlement to the Ukraine crisis, despite the fact that Western officials swiftly rejected Beijing’s 12-point peace proposal last month because it was seen as being overly friendly to Moscow.

“It is regrettable that efforts to persuade and promote talks have been undermined,” Qin said, “as if an invisible hand is pushing the conflict to escalate, taking advantage of the Ukrainian crisis to achieve certain geopolitical intentions.”

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