Chinese FM calls upon U.S. to "avoid picking another misguided fight with the wrong country"

Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi said Tuesday that it is important for the United States to avoid picking another misguided fight with the wrong country.

National flags of China and the United States. [File Photo: IC]

The ups and downs in China-U.S. relations provide ample evidence that confrontation and conflict is not in the fundamental interests of both sides, and dialogue and cooperation is the only way to go, Wang said in a keynote speech at a dinner co-hosted by the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, U.S.-China Business Council, U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Council on Foreign Relations.

In the early years of the People's Republic of China, the United States sought an all-out containment of China, Wang recalled, adding that the two countries even fought a war on the Korean Peninsula, which was followed by 22 years of estrangement and confrontation.

General Omar Bradley, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called what happened in Korea "the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy," he said, calling on the U.S. side to learn from history.

"It wasn't until the 1970s that things began to change. Dr. Kissinger's secret visit to China and the meetings between President Richard Nixon and Chairman Mao Zedong and Premier Zhou Enlai reopened the door of contact, and set us on a path toward peaceful co-existence and joint pursuit of prosperity," Wang said.

The Chinese state councilor denounced the claim by some Americans that the U.S. decades-long engagement policy has failed in its original purpose of changing China and that it is time to revert to the containment policy.

"Such an idea of modeling others according to one's own wish is wrong from the very starting point, and cannot possibly work," he said.

Seventy years on, it is important for the United States to avoid picking another misguided fight with the wrong country, he stressed.