Foreign Minister Wang Yi was the keynote speaker at a Monday event titled the Lanting Forum on Promoting Dialogue and Cooperation and Managing Differences, focused on the restoration of civil and productive relations between China and the US. Wang Yi pointed to the following extensive list of divisive, and in many cases illegal, policies implemented by Trump’s Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo.

Wang urged the new Biden Administration to:

Stop smearing the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese political system;

Stop supporting separatists in Taiwan;

Stop interfering in China’s sovereign affairs in Tibet, Hong Kong, and Taiwan

End the unreasonable tariffs;

Lift the sanctions;

Abandon the irrational suppression of Chinese tech companies;

Lift the restrictions on educational, cultural and media institutions;

Support research exchange. 

Seeing the list in one place provides a shocking sense of the madness and criminality of the Pompeo belief that the US could abandon international law and decency to act as a global dictator. 

The Global Times coverage of the event noted that President Biden had stated in his speech to the G7 and the Munich Security Forum last week, “We cannot and must not return to the reflexive opposition and rigid blocs of the Cold War.” They also took note that Biden has already taken several steps to reverse some of the Trump-Pompeo anti-China policies (although reports on these steps were largely blacked out of the US press): He paused the ban on Wechat and Tik Tok, the Chinese apps; he withdrew the order for universities to disclose financial arrangements with the Confucius Institutes; and he sponsored a dialogue between the leading epidemiologists of the two nations, Dr. Fauchi and Dr. Zhong Nanshan, who have spoken by phone about cooperation in the fight against COVID-19, and will meet at an international conference on March 2.