Biden adviser previews confrontation with China
Six days before a meeting with senior Chinese officials in Alaska next Thursday, national security adviser Jake Sullivan said the Biden administration “believes that we are going to end up in a stiff competition with China, and we intend to prevail in that competition.” He spoke during the White House press briefing on Friday afternoon.
Video Transcript
- Just a follow-up to next week's meeting with representatives from China, do you think that tariffs and export controls targeting China will be part of the talks? And what does China need to do for the US to dial back tariffs on export control?
JAKE SULLIVAN: I don't expect that, for example, the Phase 1 trade deal is going to be a major topic of conversation next week. This is our effort to communicate clearly to the Chinese government how the United States intends to proceed at a strategic level what we believe our fundamental interests and values are and what our concerns with their activities are, whether it's on Hong Kong or Xinjiang or in the Taiwan Strait, or frankly, the issues that we heard today from our [? co-op ?] partners, their coercion of Australia, their harassment around the Senkaku islands, their aggression on the border with India.
So this will stay more in that zone than get into the details of questions around tariffs or export controls. But we will communicate that the United States is going to take steps in terms of what we do on technology to ensure that our technology is not being used in ways that are inimical to our values or adverse to our security.
We will communicate that message at a broad level, but in terms of the details of these issues, we have more work to do with our allies and partners to come up with a common approach, a joint approach, before we go sit down point by point with the Chinese government on these issues.
We will also want to bring other key representatives, senior economic representatives of the Biden administration, into those conversations at this point in time when they're appropriate to occur.
- We can do one more, you guys.
