Third parties should not be forced to choose sides in a great power competition, the Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said on Saturday.
He compared China and the United States to two giant ships and said they must not collide with each other, repeating a phrase used by Xi Jinping in his virtual summit with Joe Biden last week. “Instead of a vicious competition of decoupling and breaking ties at will, let alone forcing third parties to choose sides, competition should be positive and benign, based on the principle of mutual benefit and win-win results,” Wang told an online conference.
He said the “world’s future and destiny” depended on Washington and Beijing managing their relationship properly, adding “any zero-sum game will only end up hurting us both.”
At the conference hosted by the Foreign Policy Community of Indonesia, a think tank, Wang also said that China is willing to manage its differences with other countries, especially its territorial disputes. China has disputes with four members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations over the resource-rich South China Sea.
Many Asean nations have also expressed concern over being forced to take sides in the competition between China and the US, which is centred on the Indo-Pacific.
Wang said Beijing supports Asean playing a bigger role in the region adding that a focus on cooperation and development to maintain peace and stability was is in the interests of all nations, Meanwhile, he said, instigating conflicts and creating small military and political cliques would damage peace and prosperity, “which deserves the strongest collective boycott”.
“We have noticed that Asean independently put forward its own Indo-Pacific outlook,” he added
Wang also argued that firm opposition to Taiwan independence would improve the prospects for peace, stability and prosperity, and accused Washington of using the issue to contain China.
China regards Taiwan as a breakaway province and has not renounced the use of force to reunify it with the mainland.
Wang said Taiwan was trying to use the US to become independent, and warned: “We will do our utmost to seek the prospect of peaceful reunification, but we will never tolerate any acts of Taiwan independence that split the country, nor will we accept ‘two Chinas’ or ‘one China, one Taiwan’ in the international arena.”