President Joe Biden believes in responsibly managing the relationship between the United States and China. Furthermore, responsible management of this relationship is also something that the rest of the world expects of us, said Secretary of State Antony Blinken. “And the best way to do that is to be talking, to be engaged.”
“President Biden and President Xi met at the end of last year on the margins on the APEC summit outside of San Francisco,” he said. “And they agreed that we would work to make sure that we were responsibly managing the relationship, putting as much stability into it as we possibly could, dealing directly with our differences, but also looking to see if there were areas where we can cooperate.”
The two countries have already agreed on several areas of cooperation. “One, making sure that we actually restored the military-to-military communications that we had but that had been interrupted.” said Secretary Blinken. That’s been restored, ensuring that we don’t have a miscommunication, a misunderstanding that could lead to conflict.
They then looked for areas where it made sense to cooperate. “One of those is on the scourge of synthetic opioids. The number one killer of Americans between the ages of 18 and 45 is a synthetic opioid: fentanyl.”
“The nature of this challenge is that chemicals that are made for perfectly legal purposes can be manufactured on one side of the globe and then diverted to criminal enterprises that turn it into an opioid, and that’s what’s been happening in the United States,” he said.
“As our own market gets saturated, we see these criminal enterprises developing markets in Europe, in Asia, in Latin America. … It’s why we’ve put together a coalition of more than 140 countries to work on this,” said Secretary Blinken. “China has a critical role to play because it’s a huge chemical manufacturer.”
“Many of the chemicals that are used to synthesize fentanyl start in China, get sent near us, typically to Mexico, turned into fentanyl, come into the United States, kill a lot of people,” he said. “We’ve seen positive steps that China has taken in terms of taking down some of the companies that are involved, putting in place new regulations.”
“More needs to be done … to really carry this forward,” said Secretary Blinken, “but it’s progress, and it’s a demonstration that we can work together when it’s in our mutual interest to do it.”
