The world is big enough for both the United States and China to thrive, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said Sunday as she wrapped up a visit to Beijing aimed at stablizing the relationship between the world's two largest economies.
She said she had "direct, substantive, and productive" talks with China's new economic leadership, including Premier Li Qiang and Pan Gongsheng, the newly appointed Communist Party chief of China's central bank.
"Broadly speaking, I believe that my bilateral meetings -— which totaled about 10 hours over two days — served as a step forward in our effort to put the US-China relationship on surer footing," Yellen said.
"No one visit will solve our challenges overnight. But I expect that this trip will help build a resilient and productive channel of communication," she said.
Yellen's trip marked the second visit by a US cabinet official to the Chinese capital in a matter of weeks as Washington seeks to steer relations with Beijing back on course after months of inflamed tensions.
In recent months, while pushing to resume high-level diplomatic talks, the US has imposed sanctions on Chinese companies, pushed allies in Japan and the Netherlands to restrict sales of advanced semiconductors to China and rallied other advanced economies to counter Beijing's "economic coercion."
But Yellen reiterated that the United States is not seeking to decouple from China, which she said would be "disastrous for both countries and destabilizing for the world" and "virtually impossible to undertake."
"There is an important distinction between decoupling, on the one hand, and on the other hand, diversifying critical supply chains or taking targeted national security actions," she said.
Yellen said the United States would continue to take targeted actions to protect its own national security interests and that of its allies, while making sure these actions are "transparent, narrowly scoped and targeted to clear objectives."
