Chinese President Xi Jinping received former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in Beijing on Thursday, state television CCTV reported, without elaborating.
Kissinger, who recently turned 100, was the architect of the historic rapprochement between China and the United States in the 1970s.
The meeting comes at a time when the bilateral relationship is going through the worst moment since its establishment in 1979, in the face of a prolonged trade war and disputes over the sovereignty of the South China Sea, the status of Taiwan or human rights issues.
Henry Kissinger was received yesterday by the top official of Chinese diplomacy, Wang Yi.
Wang thanked Kissinger for his “historic contributions to unfreezing China-US relations.”
But he warned Washington: “It is impossible to try to transform China and it is even more impossible to encircle and contain it.”
Kissinger, who was national security adviser and secretary of state to Richard Nixon (1969-1974) and Gerald Ford (1974-1977), secretly visited Beijing in July 1971 to prepare for the establishment of diplomatic relations and pave the way for the historic Nixon tenure. He visits China in 1972.
The former American politician continued, in recent decades, to visit China, where he met Xi Jinping on several occasions.
The opening of Washington towards China, then isolated, led to the start of the economic transformation of the Asian country, this Thursday the second largest economy in the world, only behind the United States.
Kissinger’s unannounced visit coincides with the presence in China of the US Special Envoy for Climate Affairs, John Kerry, who was also Secretary of State from 2013 to 2017 during part of Barack Obama’s presidential term.
Current US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen also recently visited Beijing, aiming to boost the bilateral relationship.
Source: TSF
