07/10/2023
US President Joe Biden said he is convinced that "there is a way" to establish a working relationship with China that benefits both nations, which have tried to get closer in recent months.
"I think there is a way to resolve, to establish a working relationship with China that benefits them and us," the president said in an interview on CNN that took place last Friday and was broadcast in full this Sunday.
Biden assured that although he is aware that Chinese President Xi Jinping wants to replace the US as the country with the largest economy and military capacity in the world, both nations can have a good relationship.
In addition, he assured that the Asian country "is changing at the moment" and that although it has "enormous capacity", it also has "enormous problems."
Although the interviewer, journalist Fareed Zakaria, asked Biden about microchips, one of the points of tension in recent weeks between the two countries, the president made no reference to this.
According to the American press, the United States is considering new restrictions on exports of artificial intelligence chips to China.
Meanwhile, this week China announced that as of August 1, it will not be possible to export gallium or germanium metal -materials that are key to the manufacture of semiconductors- nor more than a dozen of their derivatives without specific permission from the authorities to " protect national security."
Biden's interview on CNN took place in the midst of a visit by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen to Beijing, which ended on Sunday.
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A four-day visit in which Yellen has held high-level meetings to improve communication between the two countries, especially in the economic area.
Yellen met with the main economic policy makers of the Asian country, including the Prime Minister, Li Qiang; the new head of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) at the People's Bank, Pan Gongsheng; Finance Minister Liu Kun and Vice Premier He Lifeng.
In all the interactions, described by both as "frank and productive", both sides emphasized the need to "avoid misunderstandings" and try to direct their battered relationship, with which they called on to continue maintaining "dialogue and exchanges", if Well both Yellen and Chinese officials acknowledged that there are wide disagreements.
China and the United States lived through a time of great tensions during the Government of Donald Trump (2017-2021), when both nations got involved in a trade war with the mutual imposition of economic tariffs.
There was, however, a rapprochement when Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping met in November 2022 on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Bali.
Relations were damaged again after the Biden government shot down an alleged Chinese "spy" balloon that flew over the United States at the end of last January and fell over Atlantic waters on February 4.
That incident caused the Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, to suspend a trip that he had planned at the time to China, which he finally ended up doing three weeks ago.
Biden himself said on June 22 that he hopes to meet Xi in the "near future", although no date has been released for now.
