US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Friday pressed Beijing on its treatment of Uighurs, Tibetans and Hong Kong, while China defended its policies in the first conversation between top officials of the two powers since US President Joe Biden took office.
“I made clear the US will defend our national interests, stand up for our democratic values, and hold Beijing accountable for its abuses of the international system,” Blinken wrote on Twitter of his call with Yang Jiechi (楊潔篪), a politburo member and head of the Chinese Communist Party’s foreign affairs office.
Blinken told Yang that the US would “continue to stand up for human rights and democratic values, including in Xinjiang, Tibet and Hong Kong,” a US Department of State statement said of the call.
Photo: AFP
Blinken also “pressed China to join the international community in condemning the military coup” in Myanmar, it said.
The top US diplomat said the US would hold Beijing “accountable for its efforts to threaten stability in the Indo-Pacific region, including across the Taiwan Strait, and its undermining of the rules-based international system.”
The tough tone comes after Blinken in his confirmation hearing said he would continue former US president Donald Trump’s approach to China in a rare point of agreement between the two administrations.
Yang said on the call that Hong Kong, Xinjiang and Tibet were “China’s internal affairs” and “no external forces are allowed to interfere,” urging the US to “correct mistakes” made in the past few years, the Chinese embassy to the US said in a statement.
He also called on Washington to “strictly abide by the one China principle” under which Beijing considers Taiwan an inseparable part of its territory, saying that “the Taiwan issue is the most important and sensitive core issue in China-US relations.”
Blinken has previously spoken of climate change as an area of cooperation as China and the US are the two largest emitters of greenhouse gases.
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