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HIROSHIMA, Japan — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky arrived here Saturday for a dramatic last-minute visit to the Group of Seven summit of powerful democracies as President Biden sought to mobilize allies against a rising China’s growing political, military and economic power. Are you on Telegram? Subscribe to our channel for the latest updates on Russia’s war in Ukraine. ArrowRight Zelensky’s trip, which had become public only a day before, immediately overshadowed the leaders’ efforts to focus on issues beyond Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine. But it underlined the summit’s broad theme of democracies standing up to autocracies, as Biden and his counterparts highlighted Moscow and Beijing as twin threats to a democratic world order.
In their joint statement, the G-7 nations — which comprise Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States, as well as the European Union — sought to project unity on a range of global challenges. It was clear that supporting Ukraine and countering what they called China’s economic coercion remained the top priorities, and leaders specifically called out China for not playing an active role in ending Russia’s war in Ukraine.
“We call on China to press Russia to stop its military aggression, and immediately, completely and unconditionally withdraw its troops from Ukraine,” the leaders wrote in the communiqué. “We encourage China to support a comprehensive, just and lasting peace based on territorial integrity and the principles and purposes of the U.N. Charter, including through its direct dialogue with Ukraine.”
The joint statement, which also said the countries seek to have “constructive and stable relations with China,” came on the second day of a summit that has been largely oriented around Ukraine and its fight against Russia.
Zelensky, continuing his flurry of international travel in recent days, arrived on a French government plane after visiting Jiddah, Saudi Arabia, to speak at an Arab League meeting. His visit to Hiroshima, the site of nuclear destruction in World War II, came as he warned against modern-day nuclear threats by Russia.
“Japan. G-7. Important meetings with partners and friends of Ukraine,” Zelensky wrote on Twitter after he landed in Hiroshima. “Security and enhanced cooperation for our victory. Peace will become closer today.”
Biden is likely to meet with Zelensky, who won a significant victory when White House officials on Saturday confirmed they were going to allow allied nations to send F-16s to Ukraine and the United States would train Ukrainian pilots to fly the Western fighter jets. For months, the Ukrainian leader has been requesting the advanced aerial capabilities to bolster his country’s counteroffensive.
“We have delivered what we promised,” Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, told reporters Saturday. “We have given Ukraine what it needs based on close consultations between our military and theirs. And now, we have turned to discussions about improving the Ukrainian air force as part of our long term commitment to Ukraine’s self-defense.”
Sullivan described the training — which is a significant reversal for Biden, who earlier dismissed the need of the fighter jets — as a logical next phase in the war, after providing artillery, tanks, and other arms.
Before Zelensky’s arrival, the leaders spent much of the day focused on economic security, an all-but-explicit effort to push back on China’s economic influence.
In response, Beijing lambasted the G-7 leaders in a forceful statement from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Saturday evening, telling the G-7 countries to “focus on solving your own problems.”
“The era when a few developed countries in the West willfully interfered in the internal affairs of other countries and manipulated global affairs is gone forever,” said the statement.
Beijing turned the accusations of economic coercion against Washington for its use of sanctions, but did not explicitly mention the war in Ukraine, which China’s top leader Xi Jinping has repeatedly claimed to be in a position to mediate.
The statement of unity among the leaders on China comes after French President Emmanuel Macron traveled to China last month on a three-day trip that drew the ire of allies around the world. In particular, Macron sparked controversy after telling reporters during the trip that Europe should not get “caught up in crises that are not ours” in reference to concerns about China’s activity around Taiwan.
Sullivan, however, downplayed any concerns about fissures in the alliance over China. He said Biden and Macron had “a very good, constructive conversation” after the French president’s trip and maintained the communiqué’s language on China should come as no surprise.
“The statement didn’t happen by accident or osmosis,” Sullivan told reporters Saturday. “It happened because we have had intensive consultations with our partners about the PRC and about how we approach that relationship in an effective and managed way.”
U.S. officials said Biden expects to engage with Xi in the coming months, but they have yet to specify the timing of a meeting or phone call. The relationship between the United States and China seemed to be charting a new course after the two leaders met in November on the sidelines of the Group of 20 Summit in Bali, Indonesia and deputized their staff to work together on a range of issues.
But those efforts stalled in February after a Chinese spy balloon was spotted floating across the country before being shot down by the United States off the Atlantic Coast, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken responded by canceling a trip to Beijing.
The relationship remains tense, and analysts say the possibility of progress that came out of the Biden-Xi meeting six months ago has largely evaporated. Some worry over the increasingly tense rhetoric, and the expectations that positions will harden in a 2024 U.S. presidential campaign in which anti-China rhetoric is likely to escalate.
Biden has offered very little public commentary during the trip, often seen only posing briefly for photos with leaders of other countries. When pressed about the lack of media access, a senior administration official said that much of that was determined by the host country, Japan.
Biden is scheduled to hold a news conference on Sunday before returning back to Washington.
The U.S. president had initially planned for a longer and more ambitious trip aimed at countering China, but he canceled stops in Papua New Guinea — where he was set to become the first U.S. president to travel to the country — and Australia to return to Washington to focus on talks with congressional leaders over raising the government’s debt limit and avoiding a potentially catastrophic default.
That cancellation forced a flurry of efforts to limit the potential damage and any questioning of the U.S. commitments to the Indo-Pacific. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is now traveling on Sunday to Papua New Guinea, where he will meet with Prime Minister James Marape and sign a bilateral defense cooperation agreement and a bilateral maritime security agreement.
Biden on Saturday night hosted a brief meeting with the Quad — a group that also includes leaders from Australia, Japan and India — instead of the more robust meeting that had been scheduled in Australia.
Early in the meeting, Biden thanked the leaders for “accommodating the change in location.”
As a part of an effort to counter the influence of China and Russia, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has sought to appeal to emerging and developing nations with deepening economic and security ties to Beijing and Moscow. China has invested heavily into its trade relations and infrastructure projects with South American and African countries and Russia’s military and political influence is growing rapidly throughout Africa.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine triggered deep alarm in Japan, which saw it as a warning that a Chinese takeover of Taiwan could also be a reality. Japan is increasingly positioning itself as a regional leader in promoting a “free and open Indo-Pacific” united in shared values of sovereignty and opposition to changing the status quo by force. Kishida has repeatedly warned that Russia’s invasion could lead to ramifications in East Asia, saying, in a veiled reference to China: “Ukraine today may be East Asia tomorrow.”
Japan has been forging deeper relations with Southeast Asian nations with economic and security ties to China, while also balancing its own economic interests with China, its biggest trading partner.
Kishida and Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi have also been extending their outreach to Latin American and African countries in recent months. This weekend, Japan hopes to rally other world economic powers to demonstrate their commitment to supporting those nations as they face skyrocketing food and energy prices following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, climate change and infrastructure needs.
To that end, Tokyo has invited Comoros, this year’s Africa Union chair, and Brazil to the G-7 summit. In addition, Japan has invited Quad partner countries India and Australia; the Cook Islands, the chair of the Pacific Island Forum; Indonesia, chair of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations; Vietnam; and South Korea.
Global challenges “cannot be addressed by the G-7 alone, and must be addressed in cooperation with our partners in the international community, including the countries of the Global South,” Kishida said in a news conference Friday evening, using a terminology that groups together a broad swath of dozens of emerging and developing nations.
“As G-7, we hope to demonstrate that we will make a positive and concrete contribution considering the needs of the respective countries through a people-centered approach,” Kishida added.
Julia Mio Inuma contributed reporting. Tobin reported from Taipei, Taiwan.
moses_the_red on May 21st, 2023 at 04:21 UTC »
China is really being given every opportunity to turn away from its fasicst imperialist ways.
The G7 should really be cutting ties with China. That's what should be happening to any authoritarian fascist state that continually threatens Democratic countries. The 9 dashed line alone, or the genocide of the Uyghurs should be enough to trigger a de-coupling.
But people are greedy.
That said, look at this... even now China is simply being asked to turn itself around.
Doesn't fit with the tankie propaganda does it? Doesn't fit with the propaganda that China is being contained, or controlled by western powers. Western powers are simply asking for decency from China. They're asking China to follow the rules based order. They're asking China to stop supporting monstrous regimes. They're asking China to not threaten or attack nearby peaceful countries.
But China isn't going to be dissuaded by any of this. They're going to continue to pursue imperialistic power grabs, bully their neighbors, and threaten war with Taiwan, the United States and other East Asian countries.
Too bad. A war won't go well for China.
Captain_Hook_ on May 20th, 2023 at 20:45 UTC »
I feel the need to play the Devil’s advocate here, because no else seems like they will - in my view, as someone who has a degree in geopolitics, the whole “China is an existential threat” narrative is entirely for the benefit of Wall Street, big banks, and the weapons developers in the US. It actually hurts your average citizen here in the US.
All the wrongdoing that the media and politicians point to China doing, the US is also doing in a bigger way. This is not to say that China , or specifically the CCP are the good guys - they are definitely not - but I would argue that in many ways the US foreign policy and military policy is just as bad or worse as the CCP’s.
Here are a few examples that have come up recently:
1) China having ‘Secret Police stations’ in western countries - the US has the same thing at every embassy. It’s called the CIA and it operates in every county on earth. Case in point, the US was just recently caught again spying on our own allies - in this case, it was the South Korean government.
2) China stealing US trade secrets - the US has done the exact same thing throughout history, but mostly in our earlier period. For example, during the late 18th century the US government sponsored British textile experts to immigrate to the US, on the condition that they would share their highly valuable trade secrets with American textile manufacturers. This outraged the British, but they got over it pretty quickly. This is not to say that the US should openly share their trade secrets, but rather to say that every country will try to get trade secrets if they can. Not just China.
3) CCP policy towards the Uyghurs- this is one of the worst things they’ve done, and it’s certainly abominable and should be ended immediately. But for the US to try and take the moral high ground is completely ridiculous. Given we did to the Iraqi people and the people of the Middle East in contemporary times; and how our country treated the Native Americans in the past, and how it still treats them to this day.
4) Environmental pollution - critics of China will frequently point to a seeming total lack of care for the environment displayed by their industry ; these comments ignore the fact that the US and the Western economies in general are the single largest polluters per capita , far more so than your average Chinese citizen.
Environmental issues they are having are, because they are trying to rapidly grow their economy and don’t have advanced technology and unlimited capital like we do in the US. Yet despite all the advanced technology in the west, look at Germany’s energy policy in the last few months - closing their last few nuclear reactors and switching to coal- yes, coal in 2023 to meet their energy needs. I think that is worse than what the CCP has done because it is a willful choice to go with a polluting energy source as opposed to advanced non-polluting energy sources.
In fact, the CCP‘s most recent strategic policy plan lays out clean energy as a very high priority - this is because the Chinese people are increasingly aware of the harms that pollution has on their health, and the CCP is responding to that demand. Case in point China is the first country to have a fully operational advanced nuclear power Plant connected to the grid generating power. This is well ahead of the US or any other Western country, despite the US developing this advanced technology over 50 years ago.
But you will rarely if ever hear the western media or politicians talk about China’s new prioritization of clean energy and national strategy for pollution reduction from all sources.
5) The CCP spies on its own people and is a police state ; while this is largely true , I also think it’s considerably exaggerated from what the US media portrays . Don’t forget that the US via the NSA and the DHS, also conducts exactly the same kind of big Brother monitoring operations on every single person in the United States. Just as with China, if you say dangerous things or threaten violence on the Internet, you will be visited by government agents.
In conclusion, I think that the US needs to take a very serious look at its own policies, and compare them to China . Otherwise, we are just letting Wall Street the big banks and especially the weapons development industry lead us into another Cold War and we all know how well that worked out the first time (The The rich got richer. Human rights got eroded, and the world almost was ended several times by human stupidity - Cuban Missile Crisis, Able Archer ‘83 war games where the Soviets thought we were launching a real attack, etc. ).
What doesn’t get talked about nearly as much is actually how similar China is to the US geographically, economically, in terms of its aspirations, and in terms of the values of its people. in a world not dominated by China bad talking points I think there are many opportunities where the US could help correct the worst aspects of the CCP’s policies, while working together to make the world a better place.
David_Lo_Pan007 on May 20th, 2023 at 17:23 UTC »
141 Nations currently stand with Ukraine, while only 16 authoritarian countries are supporting Putin.
I assume that the situation would be much worse for China, if they attempted the same with Taiwan.