BEIJING, April 30 (Reuters) – China and the U.S. should prepare for “important high-level exchanges”, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said in a call with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Thursday, while warning the Taiwan issue is “the biggest point of risk” for relations.
“The Taiwan issue concerns China’s core interests,” Wang told Rubio, adding that the U.S. should “keep its promises and make the right choices in order to open up new space for China-U.S. cooperation and make due efforts for world peace”, an official summary of the call released by Wang’s ministry showed.
The phone conversation came weeks before an expected mid-May summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing, and it underscored Taiwan’s place at the top of Beijing’s agenda.
Wang and Rubio last met in-person in Munich in February, as trade tensions between the world’s two largest economies eased. A fragile tariff truce was struck during a Trump-Xi meeting in South Korea last October.
“Under the strategic guidance of President Xi Jinping and President Trump, China-U.S. relations have generally remained stable,” Wang told Rubio during Thursday’s call, the first publicly known conversation between the two men since the U.S. and Israel began strikes against Iran on February 28.
“Both sides should safeguard the hard-won stability, make good preparations for agendas of important high-level interactions, expand cooperation, and manage differences,” Wang said.
The two men also discussed the situation in the Middle East, the Chinese readout showed, without providing further details.
(Reporting by Xiuhao Chen, Shi Bu and Joe Cash; Editing by Alison Williams and Gareth Jones)
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