Meeting canceled over 'Venezuela issue'

Beijing said on Tuesday that "individual countries' insistence on manipulating the Venezuela issue" led to the cancellation of the Inter-American Development Bank's annual meeting, which was scheduled to be held in Chengdu, Sichuan province, starting on Tuesday.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said at a daily news conference that China deeply regrets the bank's decision to cancel the meeting, and said China is not to blame.

As the host country, China attached great importance to the meeting and did a great deal of preparation in the hope of making it a success, Geng said.

The overwhelming majority of the bank's members believe that the annual meeting should focus on financial cooperation and is not an appropriate occasion to discuss sensitive political issues, Geng said.

"Individual countries, however, kept stirring up the sensitive political issue of Venezuela," he said.

As the meeting approached, they hastily approved the representative appointed by Venezuela's self-proclaimed interim president Juan Guaido and insisted on pushing for his attendance at the meeting despite serious differences between various members, Geng said.

Though Guaido's appointment passed the bank's vote, Guaido himself is not a president seated by a legitimate procedure and lacks legal standing, and China finds it hard to allow his representative to attend the meeting in China, Geng said.

"Changing Venezuela's representative will not help to resolve the Venezuela issue," Geng said, adding that it has disrupted the atmosphere of the annual meeting and its preparation.

To guarantee a smooth meeting, China expressed caution over the attendance of Venezuela's representative, brought up a reasonable resolution, kept communicating with various parties and called on them to avoid politicizing the meeting, which is "in line with all parties' common interests," Geng said.

China believes that its cooperation with the bank and Latin American countries won't be disturbed and it is still confident about strengthening the future cooperation, he added.