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BEIJING: A senior Chinese political advisor called on the United States to respond positively to China’s stance, avoid conflict and confrontation, make efforts to manage differences, and actively expand cooperation based on mutual respect.
This will help drive China-U.S. relations back on track as soon as possible, as their bilateral ties have been facing severe challenges in the recent period, said Kong Quan, vice chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) National Committee.
In an exclusive interview with Xinhua, Kong said some American politicians had recently made false claims, including saying the United States had been ripped off by China. They even asserted that the U.S. policy of engagement with China had failed, which played up the cold-war and zero-sum game thinking and caused severe difficulties for the development of bilateral ties.
Kong said these false allegations disregarded facts and distorted the progress reached in bilateral exchanges and cooperation in various fields since the establishment of diplomatic ties between China and the United States.
“Such false claims made by some U.S. politicians are deeply shocking,” he said.
Kong recalled that over the past four decades or so, despite twists and turns, China and the United States have all along maintained the momentum of steady development in bilateral relations, which benefited the two peoples and contributed to global steadiness and development.
According to Kong, in the political field, the two countries have maintained communication and dialogue, and managed fruitful exchanges and cooperation at multiple levels in various areas. In the economic and trade fields, the bilateral volume of trade has increased by more than 200 times over the early days of diplomatic ties, and two-way investment has taken off from scratch to reach nearly 240 billion U.S. dollars.
In people-to-people exchanges, the exchange of visits between the Chinese and American people jumped from several thousand to over five million per year. Fifty pairs of sister provinces and states and 227 pairs of sister cities have been forged between the two sides.
In international affairs, although China and the United States have different positions and propositions on some issues, they have made the progress expected by the international community in jointly overcoming the financial crisis, coping with climate change, and fighting the Ebola epidemic, Kong said.
Refuting the claim that the United States had been taken advantage of or ripped off, Kong said such claims were fabricated to “make an issue” by using the so-called trade deficit.
He said in the process of globalization, trade exchanges and statistics are constantly changing and fluctuating with the improvement of the allocation of resources and markets. From the perspective of the development stage, the United States had a long-term trade surplus with China. From a structural point of view, a considerable part of China’s export profits to the United States is realized by American companies in China.
“To assert ‘being ripped off’ based on a phased trade situation obviously does not conform to the facts,” he said.
“Some U.S. politicians’ attempts to create a ‘new Cold War’ violates the fundamental interests of the two peoples, and deviates from the trend of world development,” he said.
Kong said the current situation is extremely rare in the development of China-U.S. relations, which is indeed worrying.
“The core is how the United States judges our ties, and how it plans to deal with relations,” said Kong.
