Chinese President Xi Jinping received former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in Beijing on Thursday, state television CCTV reported.
The Chinese president stressed the importance of former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s visit to Beijing, recalling that he recently turned 100 and has visited China more than 100 times.
“This result of ‘two hundred’ makes the visit meaningful,” said Xi Jinping, who is also general secretary of the Communist Party of China.
The Chinese president stressed that the two countries experienced a “critical moment” 52 years ago, but that thanks to the strategic vision of the leaders at the time, the “right decision” was made to resume Sino-US cooperation.
Xi called the seasoned American politician an “old friend of China”.
Kissinger expressed his “honour to visit China again”, in the same place where he first met Chinese leaders, in 1971, underlining that the relationship between the two countries is “important” for “world peace and the progress of the humanity”. society”.
Kissinger, who recently celebrated his 100th birthday, 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 its worst moment since it was established in 1979, amid a protracted trade war and disputes over South China Sea sovereignty, the status of Taiwan or rights issues.
Henry Kissinger was received the day before by the highest official of Chinese diplomacy, Wang Yi.
Wang thanked Kissinger for his “historic contributions to the thawing of relations between China and the United States”.
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 visit to China in 1972.
The former American politician continued to visit China over the decades, where he met Xi Jinping several times.
Washington’s openness to China, then isolated, sparked the beginning of the economic transformation of the Asian country, today the second largest economy in the world behind only the United States.
Kissinger’s unannounced visit coincides with the presence in China of US special envoy for climate affairs John Kerry, who also served as secretary of state from 2013 to 2017 during part of Barack Obama’s presidential term.
Current US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen also recently visited Beijing with the aim of strengthening bilateral relations.
Source: DN
