The Chinese president asked this Thursday to build “more bridges” with the United States, during a dinner with American businessmen in San Francisco, attended by, among others, Elon Musk and Tim Cook.
Xi Jinping participated in the event, after a meeting hours earlier with his North American counterpart, Joe Biden, to try to stabilize ties and prevent the increasingly competitive relationship from leading to an open conflict.
“We must build more bridges and pave more roads for the people of the two countries to interact. We must not erect barriers (…),” said the Chinese leader, quoted by the official Chinese news agency Xinhua.
Xi considered that Washington should not see China as the main competitor and assured that the country is willing to be a “partner and friend” of the United States, based on the fundamental principles of “respect, peaceful coexistence and cooperation for the benefit mutual”.
“If one side sees the other as the main competitor, challenge and geopolitical threat, this will only lead to uninformed policies, misguided actions and undesirable results,” he said.
“China will not wage a hot or cold war with anyone. Regardless of the level of development it reaches, China will never seek hegemony or expansion and will never impose its will on others,” he explained.
The Chinese leader also mentioned Beijing’s major multilateral initiatives, including the giant Belt and Road international infrastructure project and the Global Development, Global Security and Global Civilization initiatives, “always open to all countries.”
He also announced that the country is willing to invite 50,000 young Americans to travel to China over the next five years, as part of exchange and academic programs aimed at strengthening relations between both peoples.
The dinner, held on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum, which takes place in San Francisco until Friday, brought together tycoons and CEOs such as Elon Musk, of Tesla and SpaceX, Tim Cook, of Apple, Jane Fraser, representing the Citigroup bank, Darren Woods, from the oil company ExxonMobil, and Satya Nadella, from Microsoft.
The price of each eight-seater table was 40,000 dollars (about 37,000 euros).
The event was also attended by the US Secretary of Commerce, Gina Raimondo, who visited China this year, as well as the US Ambassador to China, Nicholas Burns, the CEOs of the asset managers BlackRock, Blackstone and Bridgewater, and the Citadel bank. Securities. .
Some Republican politicians criticized the meeting for whitewashing the image of the Asian power that, according to Congressman Mike Gallagher, is responsible for a “genocide against millions of innocent men, women and children in Xinjiang,” a region of northwest China where the minority ethnic group of Uyghur Muslim origin.
China is trying to revive the economy, which has recovered more slowly than expected after three years of the Covid-19 pandemic and housing crisis.
Xi’s visit to the United States also came at a time when American and Western companies are trying to reduce risk in supply chains by moving some operations out of China.
In October, the US increased restrictions on exports to China of semiconductors and technology for the development of artificial intelligence, to which Beijing responded with controls on exports of graphite, crucial for the manufacture of batteries for electric vehicles.
Source: TSF
