A top Chinese diplomat told his European counterpart that his country needs Russia to keep fighting in Ukraine to distract the United States from focusing on Beijing, Hong Kong’s paper of record reported last week.
According to a Friday report in the South China Morning Post, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi made the remarks on Wednesday in a conversation with Kaja Kallas, the EU’s top diplomat.
The remarks, the SCMP noted, “confirm what many in Brussels believe to be Beijing’s position but jar with China’s public utterances.
“The foreign ministry regularly says China is ‘not a party’ to the war. Some EU officials involved were surprised by the frankness of Wang’s remarks.”
However, the diplomat said that Beijing was not materially supporting the Russian war machine, either through diplomatic or military assistance.
If it had been doing so, Wang said, the conflict would already ended.
The report comes on the heels of a Trump administration decision to freeze shipments of some munitions and missiles to Ukraine because U.S. stockpiles are getting low.
The exchange came in what the SCMP described as “a marathon four-hour debate” between Wang and Kallas, the former prime minister of Estonia who became the European Union’s high representative for foreign policy last year.
Wang, the outlet said, gave Kallas “history lessons and lectures” during the session.
Do you want to see the U.S. pull out of the Russia-Ukraine conflict altogether?
The major takeaway from the tête-à-tête in Brussels, however, is that China views the United States under President Donald Trump’s administration as a threat — and believes that it’ll focus its attention on its designs on Taiwan and territory on the South China Sea if Ukraine and Russia settle their differences.
The diplomatic conversation on Wednesday was part of a wider discussion between the EU and China regarding what the bloc regards as China’s support of Russia via dual-use items.
Beijing, on the other hand, has portrayed itself as even-handed and a potential peace-broker between Kyiv and Moscow if one is needed. However, Xi’s regime has refused to condemn Moscow for the 2022 invasion or its continuance of the war.
The SCMP said that “[t]he tone of Wednesday’s dialogue was said to be respectful, if tense.
“Nonetheless, some insiders were surprised by the harshness of Wang’s message, just three weeks out from an important leaders’ summit in China. Any appearance of a charm offensive is seen to have evaporated,” the outlet noted.
Meanwhile, Kallas issued a statement which called upon Beijing “to immediately cease all material support that sustains Russia’s military industrial complex,” according to the New York Post.
Kallas also said that the talk “highlighted the serious threat Chinese companies’ support for Russia’s illegal war poses to European security.”
However, much like much of the world, the EU is in the tough position of having much of its rare earth minerals — necessary for consumer goods like computers, smartphones and EVs, as well as for defense and energy applications — supplied by China.
Beijing has placed export restrictions on seven of those materials — samarium, gadolinium, terbium, dysprosium, lutetium, scandium, and yttrium among them. The EU is demanding that China take the restrictions off.
Given the frankness and tone of the encounter, EU officials don’t see much hope for an upcoming meeting between the bloc and Chinese officialdom.
” The view in Brussels is that the gruelling encounter – interrupted by a dinner of stuffed chicken, sweet potato mousse and cheesecake – does not bode well for the summit on July 24 and 25 in Beijing and Anhui province,” the SCMP reported. “The main hope for concrete deliverables is on the climate front.”
As for the Trump administration, most of its focus on China-centric issues has involved trade. On Thursday, the United States and China reached an agreement in London to lift software and chip exports to the Chinese in exchange for Beijing’s agreement, during talks in June, to restart exports of rare earths to the United States.
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