New York: A senior Chinese official said that Beijing did not seek to reshape the global order and sought greater US cooperation, in the latest departure from past hawkish rhetoric.
At an event to mark 45 years since Washington and Beijing established relations, Liu Jianchao, who heads the international division of the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee, quoted President Xi Jinping as saying China “will not fight a Cold War, or a hot war, with anyone.”
“People in Asia have our own way of dealing with each other which values peace above everything else, and seeks peaceful solutions to all disputes,” Liu said at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
“China does not seek to change the current international order. We are one of the builders of the current world order and have benefitted from it,” he said in fluent English.
“As the world has entered the period of turbulence and transformation, people of all countries are counting on China and the United States to take the lead in resolving more global issues,” he said, pointing to cooperation at the COP28 climate summit last month in Dubai.
Relations between the world’s two largest economies had sharply deteriorated in recent years, with prominent Chinese diplomats being dubbed “wolf warriors” for their confrontational public statements against the United States.
Asked if there has been a change in approach, Liu said, “I don’t really believe that there has always been a kind of wolf warrior diplomacy, and there’s no talk about coming back to that diplomacy.”
His visit follows a summit in November in California between Xi and President Joe Biden in which China agreed to address key US concerns.
That included by resuming military dialogue and working to combat the manufacture of precursor chemicals to fentanyl, which has fuelled an addiction epidemic in the United States.
Liu said China wanted “concrete and visible deliverables” on fentanyl. — AFP
