United States Ambassador to China R. Nicholas Burns said the Biden administration is making a last-ditch effort to persuade China to stop transferring equipment to Russia for the war in Ukraine.
Mr. Burns said in an interview at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing that about 400 Chinese companies have supplied Russia with so-called dual-use products, which have both military and commercial applications. He also said that China supplied 90 percent of the microelectronics used in the Russian war effort.
Newly elected President Donald J. With less than two weeks left before Trump takes office, Mr. Burns has been raising the administration’s concerns about China’s alliance with Russia as well as Iran and North Korea in a series of meetings with Chinese ministers this week. Are. At the beginning of the week. He will leave the country next Tuesday.
More broadly, Mr Burns said China’s policies towards Russia, Iran and North Korea were inconsistent with Beijing’s desire to play a leading role in international initiatives within the global order such as the World Trade Organization and the Paris Agreement on climate change.
“Their actions are disruptive because they are aligning themselves with the most untrustworthy agents of disorder in the international system,” he said. “So the Chinese can’t have it both ways; They have to take a decision here.”
He also said China, which buys huge amounts of oil from Iran, should use its influence to insist that Iran stop the Tehran-backed Houthi militia from attacking commercial shipping in the Red Sea.
Mr Burns met with senior officials this week, including Acting Vice Foreign Minister Ma Zhaoxu and Liu Jianchao, who runs the Chinese Communist Party’s international department and is expected to become the next foreign minister. He has more meetings next week.
There was no immediate reaction from China’s Foreign Ministry. But in recent news briefings, Chinese officials have denied supplying any dual-use products, such as military-use drones, to Russia or Ukraine.
“China never provides weapons to parties to conflict and strictly controls the export of dual-use items, and China’s scope and measures of export controls on drones are the best in the world,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jiani said in December. Are the toughest throughout.” 17.
Chinese officials have also taken the stance that while the West has imposed sanctions on oil sales by Iran because of its nuclear weapons development program, the United Nations has not. So China feels no legal obligation to avoid buying Iranian oil, which sells at a deep discount to world prices, because other countries avoid it.
China has nearly quadrupled imports of Iranian oil in the two years since Iran signed a peace deal with Saudi Arabia, and last year it bought more than 90 percent of Iran’s oil exports, a Vienna-based firm said. According to Kpler, which specializes in tracking Iran’s oil shipments. , Oil sales to China by Iran’s state-owned oil sector represent more than 5 percent of the entire Iranian economy, and they pay for most of the Iranian government’s operations.
Iran has suffered several setbacks, including Israeli air strikes against Tehran’s air defenses and Israel’s defeat of Hezbollah, Iran’s main ally in Lebanon. China responded by sending Zhang Guoqing, one of its four vice premiers, to meet with Iranian President Massoud Pezeshkian in Tehran last month.
“China supports Iran in safeguarding its national sovereignty, security, territorial integrity and its legitimate rights and interests,” Mr Zhang said in Tehran.
Andon Pavlov, a senior analyst at Kpler, said on Thursday that the Biden administration is expected to expand its blacklist of tankers carrying Russian or Iranian oil, and China could ban these ships from its ports. reuters News came this week that authorities in Shandong province, the main Chinese entry point for Iranian oil, have begun blocking blacklisted tankers from their ports.
But Mr. Pavlov said Iran’s methods of sending oil to China are so opaque that it is hard to predict the effectiveness of such measures.
Mr. Burns’ discussions with senior Chinese officials this week and next week are part of a broader recent diplomatic effort by the Biden administration. In November, President Biden met with China’s top leader Xi Jinping at a conference in Peru, and in August, national security adviser Jake Sullivan met with Mr. Xi in Beijing.
While Mr. Burns declined to predict the Trump administration’s potential policies toward China, he said communications between the two countries’ militaries have improved to prevent accidental confrontation. And last October, for the first time in 13 years, China allowed the recovery of the remains of US military personnel missing in action during World War II.
He also praised China’s recent actions to limit exports of chemicals used to make fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid that is the leading cause of drug overdose deaths in the United States. China has arrested 300 people in the fentanyl industry, shut down several online stores selling precursor chemicals for the production of fentanyl, and banned the export of 55 precursor chemicals and synthetic drugs, Mr. Burns said.
li yu Contributed to research.