“It hopes that the US will adopt a rational and pragmatic policy towards China and work with China to respect each other’s core interests and major concerns.”

 

In a speech at the United Nations in September, Biden had said the US was “not seeking a new cold war or a world divided into rigid blocs”.

The Chinese statement said that Yang and Sullivan had shared “comprehensive, frank and in-depth exchanges”, and that the meeting had been “constructive and conducive to enhancing mutual understanding”.

Seven months earlier in Alaska, Yang had lashed out at the US, saying it was not entitled to talk to China from a “position of strength”. A statement released by China after that meeting expressed Beijing’s anger with US criticisms of its governance system and other areas such as its handling of Hong Kong.

 

The Zurich meeting ended with a “different tone than Anchorage” and was the two powers’ “most in-depth conversation” of Biden’s presidency so far, a senior US official reportedly said in a briefing to American media.

The official said Yang and Sullivan were able to have a “candid” and “wide-ranging” discussion, with Sullivan highlighting alleged human rights violations in 

, the   and Beijing’s military deployment in the  .

 

 

The official added that 

 needed to be dealt with separately from other issues in the relationship – contrary to Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s remark to US climate envoy John Kerry in September that cooperation on   would be compromised if bilateral relations were dominated by confrontation.

 

The Chinese statement did not give specific details of the areas discussed, saying only that the talks covered the issues of Hong Kong, Taiwan, 

, Tibet, human rights and maritime disputes.

 

 

But there was a notable difference between the two sides’ statements. The White House said the meeting was intended to responsibly manage the competition between the two sides, whereas Yang was quoted as saying that Beijing opposed seeing China-US relations as “competition”.

Pang Zhongying, an international relations expert at Ocean University of China, said the talks had been unusually long, at six hours, and that both sides were making efforts to improve relations.

 

“It is a sign that the ties between the two nations are improving,” he said. “But still, China does not want to see its relations with the US as competition. It wants to stress more on cooperation.”