US President Joe Biden revealed this Sunday, as part of the G7 summit in Hiroshima, Japan, that he is considering lifting sanctions imposed on China’s defense minister General Li Shangfu.
“It’s up for debate,” said Joe Biden, after being asked at a news conference if he’s considering lifting the sanctions.
Li Shangfu, appointed China’s defense minister last March, faced sanctions from the United States in 2018 over charges of buying weapons from Russia’s state-owned company Rosoboronexport.
United States of America (US) Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin requested a meeting with Li, but Beijing rejected the meeting, citing sanctions as an obstacle to these talks between the two countries’ defense ministers.
At the same press conference in Hiroshima, at the end of the G7 summit (group of the seven most industrialized democracies in the world), Biden expressed confidence that relations between Washington and Beijing “will thaw very soon”.
Relations between the two powers were strained again after Biden’s administration shot down an alleged Chinese “spy balloon” that flew over the United States in late January and fell over Atlantic waters on Feb. 4.
Biden referred to that incident today, saying that “everything has changed” in Washington-Beijing relations since “that idiotic balloon carrying the equivalent of two wagonloads of spy equipment flew over the United States.”
The incident caused US Secretary of State Antony Blinken to cancel a planned trip to China at the time, but Washington expressed a desire to resume the visit in the near future.
As a sign of rapprochement, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan traveled to Vienna to meet China’s top diplomat Wang Yi.
China and the United States experienced a time of great tension during the administration of Donald Trump (2017-2021), when both nations became embroiled in a trade war with the imposition of tariffs on each other.
However, there was a rapprochement when Biden and China’s President Xi Jinping met on the sidelines of the G20, in Bali, Indonesia, in November 2022.
Both agreed to improve their channels of dialogue to prevent competition between China and the United States from turning into open conflict, but relations were again complicated by the balloon incident.
Source: DN
