(Bloomberg) -- Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in New York for more than an hour on Friday, in what was one of their last face-to-face encounters before the US presidential election that will shape the course of US-China relations for the next four years.
Blinken, according to a State Department account of the exchange, expressed “continued concern” over China’s support of Russia in its invasion of Ukraine, and its activities in the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea.
Wang, according to the state-run Xinhua news agency, told Blinken that “since the United States has expressed multiple times that it has no intention to have conflict with China, then fundamentally, it needs to establish a rational perception of China, and find the right way to get along with it.”
The meeting on the sidelines of the annual UN General Assembly had been planned for several days but occurred with tensions surging anew in the Middle East after Israel conducted a massive airstrike on Hezbollah’s headquarters in Beirut.
During a meeting of the UN Security Council earlier this week, Blinken criticized China over its support of Russia.
Security Council
“China, another permanent member of this council, is the top provider of machine tools, microelectronics, and other items that Russia is using to rebuild, to restock, to ramp up its war machine and sustain its brutal aggression,” Blinken said.
US-China contacts have been more frequent following a meeting in California last November between President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping.
--With assistance from Ramsey Al-Rikabi.
(Updates with US, China readouts of meeting starting in second paragraph.)
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