Blinken to meet Chinese counterpart in Laos
The US secretary of state and Chinese foreign minister will both attend an ASEAN summit in Vientiane.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken will meet Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in the Laotian capital of Vientiane during next week’s ASEAN foreign ministers’ meeting there, he said on Friday.
It will be their first meeting since this month’s NATO meeting in Washington, when the United States and the 31 other member states of the transatlantic alliance called China the “decisive enabler” of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and called for it to withdraw support.
China and Russia carried out joint military exercises in Belarus during the meeting and then carried out joint naval drills in the days after.
Speaking at the Aspen Security Forum, Blinken said despite any differences between Beijing and Washington, leaders of the two sides continued to hold frequent talks – including himself and Wang.
“I speak to him on a fairly regular basis, and I'll be seeing him next week, in fact, in Laos,” Blinken said, alluding to the ASEAN foreign ministers’ retreat, which runs from Sunday to Friday in Vientiane.
The U.S. secretary of state acknowledged it might appear outwardly confusing that Washington was striving to maintain such regular ties with Chinese officials while publicly lambasting their decisions.
But he said that was diplomacy in action.
“It's also important because … we're able to communicate very clearly on areas where we disagree, so at least China knows where we're coming from, just as we know where they're coming from,” Blinken said, citing the South China Sea and Taiwan as examples.
U.S.-China relations, he added, would be difficult to encapsulate “on a bumper sticker” – unless it was a “very long, long bumper sticker.”
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