When the top diplomats of four major Asia-Pacific nations met here in the Indian capital on Friday to discuss issues in the region, one had a direct message for the behemoth whose shadow loomed over the talk.
China must “act under the international institutions, standards and laws” to avoid conflict, Yoshimasa Hayashi, the foreign minister of Japan, said on a public panel that included his counterparts from the United States, India and Australia.
That request is one that every official on that stage has made on many occasions. Although Russia’s war in Ukraine has dominated diplomatic dialogue around the globe this past year, the dilemma of dealing with an increasingly assertive China is ever-present — and for many nations, a thornier problem than relations with Moscow. They subscribe to the framing that President Biden and his aides have presented: China is the greatest long-term challenge, and the one nation with the power and resources to reshape the American-led order to its advantage.
At the heart of this predicament is the fact that the United States and its allies maintain deep trade ties with China even as their security concerns and ideological friction with the nation’s leader, Xi Jinping, and the Chinese Communist Party escalate.
For President Biden and his aides, that tension came into sharp focus in recent weeks after a Chinese spy balloon began drifting over the continental United States, and when, in their telling, they came across intelligence that China is considering sending weapons to Russia for its war. That prospect has prompted American diplomats and those from allies and partners to deliver warnings to Chinese counterparts, including here in New Delhi.
The anxieties over both China’s and Russia’s increasingly discordant roles on the world stage were perhaps wrapped into a lament on Thursday by Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India that “multilateralism is in crisis today.”
“Global governance has failed in both its mandates” of preventing wars and fostering international cooperation, he said in a video address to a conference of top diplomats from the Group of 20 nations, made up of the world’s major economies, including China and Russia.
The four Asia-Pacific countries represented on the panel one day later at the Raisina Dialogue form the Quad partnership, which was revived in 2017 after many years of dormancy and has gained momentum since, mainly because of shared strategic concerns over China. But in a sign of the delicate balance they are trying to strike in relations with Beijing, the diplomats took pains to stress in their public comments that the Quad is not a security or military organization. Mr. Hayashi was the sole panelist to mention China, and only after being prompted by the panel’s moderator.
Their joint statement, released after private meetings, did not mention China, although many points in it, including the issue of “peace and security in the maritime domain,” are obviously aimed at Chinese policies.
At the earlier Group of 20 conference, the foreign minister of China, Qin Gang, joined the foreign minister of Russia, Sergey V. Lavrov, in playing the role of spoiler.
Together, they opposed two paragraphs in a proposed consensus communiqué, the first of which directly criticized Russia’s war in Ukraine. Even though the leaders of the Group of 20 had approved the same two paragraphs in a consensus document at a meeting last year in Bali, Indonesia, China has dug in with Russia to sabotage both this week’s communiqué and a similar one proposed at a G20 finance ministers’ conference in late February in Bengaluru, India.
The second paragraph in the communiqué that they objected to did not mention Russia or Ukraine. It simply said that all the nations agreed to uphold United Nations principles on international humanitarian law, “including the protection of civilians and infrastructure in armed conflicts” and forbidding “the use or threat of use of nuclear weapons.”
Some diplomats privately expressed surprise that China opposed a reiteration of such basic principles, a move that forced the conference to issue a lower-level chair’s statement. Mr. Qin’s stance seemed to validate concerns that his government was willing to side with Russia in a growing number of diplomatic venues — including at the United Nations Security Council — to undermine policies or actions that the vast majority of nations endorse.
“Russia and China were the only two countries that made clear that they would not sign on to that text,” Antony J. Blinken, the U.S. secretary of state, said pointedly at a news conference on Thursday night. He added that he agreed with Mr. Modi “that there are real challenges to the multilateral system.”
He noted, too, that at the U.N. Security Council, “we have two countries in particular that tend to block the attempted actions of the council to address some of the most urgent global concerns.”
Mr. Blinken has also expressed skepticism over a push by Beijing for peace negotiations in the war in Ukraine, saying Chinese officials are merely creating a smoke screen to buy Russia more time to press its assault.
Source: https://dnyuz.com/2023/03/03/tom-sandoval-seen-leaving-home-with-packed-bags-following-ariana-madix-split/
