HONG KONG – National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan met with China’s top defense official in Beijing on Thursday, a day after the White House said President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping would speak by phone “in the coming weeks.”
Sullivan, who is on his first trip to China as national security adviser, met with Gen. Zhang Youxia, vice chairman of China’s Central Military Commission, in the highest public interaction the Biden administration has had with China’s military.
Sullivan “emphasized that both countries have an obligation to prevent competition from devolving into conflict or confrontation,” the White House said in a statement from the meeting.
The meeting comes at a time of rising military tensions between China and the US’s Asia-Pacific allies, and Washington has criticized China’s growing pressure on Taiwan, Beijing’s self-governing island democracy, and China’s military actions in the South China Sea. , a strategically important waterway that Beijing claims in its entirety.
The White House said Sullivan highlighted the importance of peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait and the U.S. commitment to freedom of navigation in the South China Sea, as well as concerns about China’s support for Russia’s defense industry in its war against Ukraine.
Zhang said maintaining stability in US-China military and security affairs was “in the interests of both sides and also expected by the international community.” But he stressed that Taiwan’s status is “at the core of China’s nuclear interests” and said the United States should “stop military collusion with Taiwan, stop arming Taiwan and stop spreading false narratives about Taiwan.”
“‘Taiwan independence’ and peace in the Taiwan Strait are like fire and water – they cannot coexist,” Zhang said, according to a statement from China’s Ministry of Defense.
Their meeting was the first time a US official met with Commission Vice Chairman then Defense Secretary Jim Mattis in 2018.
Chinese state media reported that Sullivan will meet with Xi later on Thursday.
Sullivan arrived in Beijing on Tuesday for two days of talks with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi as part of an effort to address tensions in what is widely considered the world’s most important bilateral relationship.
The White House said the two sides had “honest, substantive and constructive” discussions on a range of bilateral, regional and global issues.
“Both sides welcomed ongoing efforts to maintain open lines of communication, including planning for a leadership-level phone call in the coming weeks,” it said in an introduction to the Sullivan-Wang meeting.
A Chinese foreign ministry statement said the two sides would “discuss a new round of interaction between the two heads of state in the near future.”
Both sides said there are also plans for a phone call between their military theater commanders. Xi agreed to resume military-to-military communications last year, after cutting them off in 2022 in response to then-Speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in California.
The Biden administration has sought to “responsibly manage” competition with China and has also sought areas of cooperation such as climate change and the international flow of illegal drugs. But relations hit their lowest point in decades early last year when a Chinese spy balloon appeared over North America and was shot down by the US military.
Sullivan and Wang have held a series of backchannel meetings since last year in an attempt to stabilize relations. They met in Vienna in May 2023, Malta in September and Bangkok in January. Wang also visited Washington in October to meet with Biden.
But this was Sullivan’s first trip to China as national security adviser and the first by a national security adviser since Susan Rice near the end of the Obama administration in 2016. Rice was also the last national security adviser to meet with a vice president. Military Commission.
“We’re working to make sure that competition doesn’t come into conflict and that we find ways to work together where our interests align,” Sullivan said after arriving in Beijing on Tuesday.
Biden and Xi have spoken only once by phone since November, when they had four hours of talks on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) leaders’ meeting in California. Because direct contact is so rare, the two leaders will have few opportunities to interact one-on-one before Biden leaves the White House early next year.
They reached agreement on several areas during their talks in November, including counternarcotics, military-to-military communications and the security and risks of artificial intelligence. The White House said Sullivan and Wang discussed next steps to implement those agreements.
China announced on Wednesday that a second round of talks between the US and China is being planned on artificial intelligence.
They also discussed cooperation in other areas, such as the repatriation of illegal immigrants and climate change. China and the United States are the world’s two largest producers of greenhouse gas emissions.
Without a date, the White House readout mentioned an upcoming trip to China by John Podesta, who recently succeeded John Kerry as US climate envoy.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
