(Beijing) Joe Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan met with a senior Chinese military official on Thursday, part of a rare trip to China aimed at managing differences between Beijing and Washington.
The talks come amid tensions between China and key Washington allies in Asia, Japan, the Philippines and Taiwan. The United States has pledged to support them.
“It’s rare that we get to have this kind of exchange,” Sullivan said in remarks to Chinese Gen. Zhang Youxia, vice chairman of the Central Military Commission.
“I think this is a very important meeting, given the state of the world and the need to responsibly manage the relationship between China and the United States,” said Sullivan, whose trip to China is the first since 2016 for a White House national security adviser.
Mr. Zhang, for his part, praised “the value that the American government places on military security.”
Japan, a signatory to a security treaty with the United States, deployed fighter jets on Monday after the unprecedented incursion of a Chinese military aircraft into its airspace.
For its part, the Philippines, linked to the United States by a mutual defense treaty, considered Tuesday that China is the “biggest disturber” of peace in the region, after a series of skirmishes in the South China Sea with Chinese ships.
China, which considers Taiwan to be part of its territory, regularly accuses the United States, the island’s main arms supplier, of tacitly supporting the independence movement.
China on Wednesday warned the United States against supporting the Philippines in the South China Sea, as Washington pledged to back its allies.
The two rival superpowers, however, appear determined to continue communicating and have, according to the White House, begun to prepare a possible telephone exchange between US President Joe Biden and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping “in the coming weeks.”