[Stars and Stripes] In a much anticipated speech which marked the first time China's top diplomat, Yang Jiechi, addressed an American audience under the new administration at the New York based National Committee on US-China Relations, the top Communist Party official warned the US it must stop interfering Beijing's "core interests" in Hong Kong, Xinjiang, and Tibet affairs or else it risks crossing China's "red line".
Ostensibly a gesture signaling China wants cooperation with the US under Biden, Yang as director of the Central Foreign Affairs Commission and member of the powerful 25-member Politburo, urged that Biden abandon Trump's "misguided policies against China" which has plunged the relationship into its "most difficult period since the establishment of diplomatic ties".
In the remote video address Yang laid out, "We believe that peace and development are still the prevailing trend of the times, and that peaceful coexistence and win-win cooperation remain the shared aspiration of all peoples," according to Bloomberg.
Listing a number of flashpoints where already since his Jan.20 inauguration President Biden has eyed pressuring Beijing over human rights issues and anti-democracy crackdown, most notably Hong Kong and the Uighur persecution in northwest Xinjiang province (and of course Taiwan continues to loom large), Yang said forcefully: |