BEIJING: President Xi Jinping’s four-day trip to San Francisco in the United States has steadied the course for ties between the world’s two largest economies and injected fresh impetus into cooperation in the Asia-Pacific region, a senior official and analysts said.
Xi attended over 10 bilateral and multilateral events, including a summit with US President Joe Biden that spanned over four hours, and a banquet with US business executives and citizens committed to promoting bilateral friendship, during which he received a standing ovation several times.
The China-US summit, a major event in international relations, is capable of steering Sino-US ties toward “a healthy, stable and sustainable direction”, said Wang Yi, a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and foreign minister, in a media briefing.
The Xi-Biden meeting in Filoli, a historic estate south of San Francisco, showcased the positive intentions of both sides and achieved significant outcomes, and it holds extraordinary significance, Wang said, adding that the summit will “play a crucial role in guiding the fluctuating course of China-US relations”.
Key outcomes of the summit include agreements to step up counternarcotics cooperation, jointly tackle the climate crisis, resume high-level military-to-military communication and expand educational, student, youth, cultural, sports and business exchanges.
Xi also laid out the five pillars of China-US relations, urging both sides to develop a right perception of each other, effectively manage their differences, jointly advance mutually beneficial cooperation, shoulder responsibilities together as major countries and forge stronger people-to-people exchanges. These five pillars have opened up a vision for the future of China-US relations, Wang said.
Sourabh Gupta, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Institute for China-America Studies, said the pillars will be useful in shaping US-China relations. “The five pillars guide how the two countries can move for-ward. … It becomes easier to grasp and then move forward on that basis and have actual results,” he said.
“The two countries can move together in the same direction. They can basically row together on the basis of common elements in their relationship, where they can then work under these various pillars,” Gupta added. –The Daily Mail-China Daily news exchange item
