Set guidelines, not guardrails for relations, envoy says

To navigate China-US relations safely and soundly, it is more important to set guidelines than build guardrails, and the two countries should work together to dial up dialogue and cooperation in 2023, a top Chinese envoy said at a Chinese Lunar New Year reception in Washington.

Early last month, White House Indo-Pacific Coordinator Kurt Campbell said the dominant characteristic of the US-China relationship will continue to be competition, but Washington wants to build guardrails and a foundation that will prevent the relationship from moving into a destabilizing place.

Xu Xueyuan, charge d'affaires of the Chinese embassy in the United States, offered a different perspective.

"For our relations to go steadily forward like a giant ship, our priority is not building 'guardrails' to prevent accidents, but setting 'guidelines' for safe navigation," Xu said on Tuesday at the first in-person celebration of the Chinese New Year at the embassy in the past three years.

"These guidelines must contain basic elements such as no conflict or confrontation, mutual respect and win-win cooperation. Only with the guidelines and only when they are followed can we ensure that there will be no loss of direction, no deviation, and no bumping into the 'guardrails'," she said.

The envoy said the face-to-face meeting between the two countries' leaders in Indonesia's Bali has charted the course for China-US relations, as the two heads of state agreed to ramp up communication and exchanges, advance practical cooperation, and bring relations back to the right track.

Common understandings

"In the new year, we look forward to working with people from various sectors in the US to implement the important common understandings of the two presidents, reduce as many differences and frictions as possible, and build as much dialogue and cooperation as possible," Xu said.

Also speaking at the reception, Kin Wah Moy, principal deputy assistant secretary for the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs at the State Department, said though China and the US have differences, those differences "make us unique and beautiful".

During the annual Lunar New Year gala of the China General Chamber of Commerce-USA held in New York on Wednesday evening, Xu said: "China's development will create conditions for the win-win cooperation between Chinese and American companies and inject impetus to the development of the world economy.

"We need to have a sense of urgency, engage more frequently, and substantiate the dialogue, in a bid to enhance mutual trust, promote cooperation and show the world that dialogue can deliver."

In a video sent to the gala, former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger said each nation needs to understand the other more fully, and its leaders need to find an opportunity to realize that conflict and confrontation "can only lead to ultimate disaster".

Kissinger said when societies look at each other across different cultures, it is sometimes difficult to avoid concerns because "the development of a country economically also increases its inherent military capability, independent of the actions necessarily of the leaders at any one point in time".

China and the US need to understand that they have different perceptions of culture and how they conduct themselves, Kissinger said.

"Neither nation can be defeated.There is no shortcut, and there is no clever diplomacy that can get a decisive advantage," he said. "The only thing that will avoid humanity destroying itself by its own achievements is to make use of its intellectual, true political and historic visions."

Minlu Zhang in New York contributed to this story.