Chinese Vice President Urges U.S. to Respect ‘Core Interests’

By EDWARD WONG, Published: February 15, 2012                                                       .....+

WASHINGTON — On the second day of an ambitious tour through the United States, China’s vice president and presumed next leader, Xi Jinping, said Wednesday that the two nations must respect each other’s “core interests” while working to build trust and cooperation on a variety of issues, including trade policies and diplomacy with North Korea and Iran.

Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg News      

Vice President Xi Jinping of China emphasized in Washington on Wednesday that the United States should not support independence for Tibet or Taiwan.

Mr. Xi delivered his remarks, billed as the major policy speech of his five-day trip, at a lunch attended by hundreds of business executives, officials, China scholars and diplomats.

Mr. Xi’s use of the term “core interests” was intended to emphasize the existence of a line that the United States and other countries should not cross in discussions with China. The Chinese government’s definition of the term has been evolving in recent years, but it has become standard in diplomatic conversations between China and the United States, and Chinese officials have been using it more often and more assertively to push back against a variety of pressures from other nations.

In particular, “core interests” has come to mean territorial sovereignty, and Mr. Xi stressed that the United States should oppose those advocating independence in Taiwan and Tibet. Protesters supporting Tibetan independence have been especially vocal in the streets of Washington during Mr. Xi’s trip, waving Tibetan flags and chanting as Chinese officials have been driven from meeting to meeting through the capital.

Conflict has once again flared on the Tibetan plateau in the past year, and unrest there is one of China’s greatest security concerns; nearly two dozen Tibetans, mostly clergy members, have burned themselves to death since last March out of frustration at their plight, and mass protests have taken place in Tibetan towns in recent months. Chinese security forces have opened fire on several occasions.

Mr. Xi said he hoped that the United States would “honor its commitment to recognizing Tibet as a part of China and oppose Tibetan independence and handle Tibetan issues in a prudent and proper manner.”

On the issue of expanding respect for human rights, Mr. Xi said, “It is only natural that we have some differences.”

Later, Mr. Xi softened his tone with a long anecdote about how as a provincial official he had helped the wife of an elderly American professor visit the town in Fujian Province where the professor had spent part of his childhood.

Mr. Xi’s comments came a day after Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., in an official welcoming toast at a State Department lunch, outlined a long list of American complaints and plans, focusing on trade and currency issues and the reassertion of American military influence in Asia.

Just as Mr. Biden’s remarks were aimed in part at his domestic audience in an election year, Mr. Xi’s muscular remarks on Taiwan and Tibet seemed intended as much for Chinese ears as American ones.

Mr. Xi, who is expected but not certain to succeed President Hu Jintao in the fall, has to appear willing to stand up for the interests of China while being able to build a relationship with the United States. Any sign of weakness could give ammunition to his political opponents.

The intense rivalry over China’s leadership jobs has been underscored in recent days by talk of a political attack on Bo Xilai, a powerful municipal official with aspirations to higher office who, like Mr. Xi, is considered a “princeling,” the child of members of the Communist Party aristocracy.

On Wednesday morning, Mr. Xi visited with Congressional leaders on Capitol Hill, where human rights conditions in China have been a focus of criticism far more strident than at the White House.

On Tuesday, some representatives listened to testimony on rights abuses in China, with a focus on the cases of two imprisoned rights activists, Guo Quan and Gao Zhisheng.

“It is our fervent hope that Vice President Xi can reverse the course of his predecessors and usher in positive changes in China,” Representative Christopher H. Smith, Republican of New Jersey and chairman of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, said in a statement on Tuesday. “But we remain extremely concerned, as the run-up to Vice President Xi becoming the next leader of China has been accompanied by one of the worst crackdowns in recent memory.”

The lunch at which Mr. Xi delivered his speech, held at a hotel, the Washington Marriott Wardman Park, was organized by the U.S.-China Business Council and the National Committee on United States-China Relations. But the points he touched on reached beyond economic matters. Until this speech, he had not publicly invoked China’s core interests.

Using other common diplomatic terms, Mr. Xi also emphasized the need for the United States and China to “increase mutual understanding and strategic trust.”

Mr. Xi underscored the close economic ties between the nations, saying that two-way trade had reached $446 billion last year and was expected to grow to more than $500 billion this year.

But China needed the United States to address certain “imbalances,” he said, “in particular, easing control on civilian high-tech exports to China as soon as possible.”

On Tuesday, Mr. Biden and President Obama assertively told Mr. Xi and other officials in separate meetings that China must help rebalance the world economy and lower trade barriers. In particular, they said, China needed to appreciate its currency; enforce laws around intellectual property rights; and halt rules that compel foreign companies to transfer technology to Chinese counterparts or the Chinese government in exchange for doing business in China.

Mr. Xi later acknowledged in a forum with business leaders that he had heard the complaints, but that China had its own demands of the United States, particularly concerning American restrictions on exporting technology.

On Wednesday, in what appeared to be a rejoinder to Mr. Biden’s assertion the previous day that the United States was a Pacific power, Mr. Xi spoke of China’s hopes and hesitations in seeing the United States try to widen its role, economically and militarily, in Asia.

“China welcomes a constructive role by the United States in promoting peace,” Mr. Xi said. “At the same time, we hope the United States respects the interests of China and other nations in this region.”

Mr. Xi left the Wednesday lunch after delivering his remarks to catch a flight to Iowa. He had plans to visit with Americans he had met in the farming town of Muscatine when he went there in the 1980s as part of a delegation of midlevel Chinese officials studying agriculture techniques.

Mr. Xi is scheduled to fly to Los Angeles from Des Moines on Thursday and is expected to spend two days in California.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 21, 2012


An article on Thursday about the visit to the United States of Xi Jinping, the vice president of China, misspelled, in some editions, the given name of an imprisoned Chinese human rights activist whose case was discussed in a Congressional hearing the day before Mr. Xi met with Congressional leaders. The activist is Guo Quan, not Yuan.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/16/world/asia/vice-president-xi-jinping-of-china-urges-united-states-to-respect-core-interests.html?ref=asia