A US congressional delegation has called for more dialogue with China during a rare visit.
“We want to open up the lines of communication,” U.S. Representative Adam Smith, a Democrat who is leading the bipartisan delegation, said in Beijing on Tuesday.
China and the U.S. are the most powerful countries in the world, and no other relationship between the two states is likely to be more consequential for the coming decades, he said.
This is the first official visit by members of the U.S. House of Representatives to China since 2019.
Smith said at a news briefing that, while Beijing and Washington have differences of opinion.
“There should be “mechanisms in place to talk about those disagreements and resolve them in the most reasonable way possible.”
“I feel strongly that there has not been enough communication between leaders in the U.S. and leaders in China,” Smith said.
Earlier, Chinese Premier Li Qiang, his deputy He Lifeng, who is involved in the tariff talks with the U.S. as chief negotiator, and Defence Minister Dong Jun received the delegation from Washington separately.
According to Chinese reports, the two sides discussed, among other things, respectful relations and better exchanges, for example at the military level.
The US and China resumed communication between their armed forces in 2023 after interrupting them in 2022.
This time, military issues were a particular focus partly because Smith and other members of the delegation belong to the U.S. House committee that oversees the armed forces.
China’s army is growing faster than any other in the world, Smith said, warning that “the risk of a misunderstanding of capabilities on one side or the other is great.
