By Humeyra Pamuk, Simon Lewis and David Brunnstrom
NEW YORK (Reuters) -U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken underscored strong U.S. concerns about China’s support for Russia’s defense industrial base in talks with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi on Friday and said Beijing’s talk of peace in Ukraine “doesn’t add up.”
In a meeting with Wang on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in New York, Blinken said he also raised China’s “dangerous and destabilizing actions” in the South China Sea and discussed improving communication between the U.S. and Chinese militaries.
Blinken told a press conference he and Wang also discussed ways to disrupt the flow of drugs into the United States, and the risks posed by artificial intelligence.
Blinken said that about 70 percent of the machine tools Russia is importing and 90 percent of the microelectronics come from China and Hong Kong, and that this was materially helping Moscow produce the missiles, rockets, armored vehicles and munitions needed to perpetuate its war.
“So when Beijing says that, on the one hand, it wants peace, it wants to see an end to the conflict, but on the other hand, is allowing its companies to take actions that are actually helping Putin continue the aggression, that doesn’t add up.”
China and Brazil on Friday pressed ahead with an effort to gather developing countries behind a Ukraine peace plan, despite Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s dismissal of the initiative as serving Moscow’s interests.
Seventeen countries attended the meeting chaired by Wang and Brazilian foreign policy adviser Celso Amorim. Wang told reporters they discussed the need to prevent escalation, to avoid the use of weapons of mass destruction and prevent attacks on nuclear power plants.
The White House and the European Union said this week they were deeply concerned by a Reuters report that Russia has established a weapons program in China to develop and produce long-range attack drones for use in the war.
Wang earlier on Friday declined to comment on the Reuters report when questioned by a reporter at the U.N. headquarters.
Blinken said that crucial to achieving a lasting peace in Ukraine was “pressing Iran, North Korea and China … to stop providing weapons, artillery, machinery and other support” to Russia.
China and the U.S., the world’s two biggest economies and superpowers, are at odds over a wide range of issues from the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, U.S. export controls on advanced chip technology, trade tariffs, Taiwan and human rights.
Beijing has repeatedly complained about U.S. ties and arms supplies to Taiwan. It has also urged the U.S. to remove tariffs on Chinese goods and denounced U.S. proposals to ban Chinese software and hardware in vehicles on its roads due to national security concerns.
Last week, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell said the challenges to the U.S. posed by China exceeded those of the Cold War.
Relations plummeted last year after a Chinese spy balloon flew across the United States and was shot down, but the two sides have since sought to keep lines of communication open to prevent, the U.S. says, competition spiraling into conflict.
U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan met Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing last month at the end of talks to ease frictions ahead of November’s U.S. election.
The White House said then a call was being planned soon between Xi and U.S. President Joe Biden.
Asked about this after meeting Wang, Blinken said he had nothing to announce about schedules, but he and his counterpart agreed on the importance of their leaders communicating and added: “I fully anticipate that we’ll see that in the weeks and months ahead.”
(Reporting by David Brunnstrom, Humeyra Pamuk and Simon Lewis; Editing by Howard Goller and Alistair Bell)
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