This morning Mme. Secretary met with her Chinese counterpart, Foreign
Minister Yang Jiechi. A senior State Department official provided a
briefing. This is the only still picture available from today so far.
Background Briefing: Readout of the Secretary's Meeting With Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi
Special Briefing
Office of the Spokesperson
Waldorf Astoria Hotel
New York City
September 27, 2012
SENIOR STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL: So
briefly, on background, Senior State, the Secretary had a very full
meeting with Chinese Foreign Minister Yang this morning. They began the
meeting talking about the Chinese-Japanese tensions over the Senkakus.
The Secretary, as she has been urging for a number of months, including
when she was in China in the summer and when she was at APEC and had a
chance to see Prime Minister Noda, again urged that cooler heads
prevail, that Japan and China engage in dialogue to calm the waters,
that we believe that Japan and China have the resources, have the
restraint, have the ability to work on this directly and take tensions
down. And that is our message to both sides.
They then talked
about South China Sea issues. As you may know, this is an area where,
after intense diplomatic focus by all the players, including, notably,
the Foreign Minister of Indonesia who was in Washington not too long
ago, we now have restarted informal meetings between senior officials of
China and ASEAN. They had a meeting in Phnom Penh two weeks ago. We
expect these meetings are going to continue in the lead-up to the East
Asia Summit in November. This is precisely what the Secretary had been
advocating, what we had been advocating – that they restart a dialogue.
And so the Secretary commended China for that. I think she’ll make the
same point when she sees the ASEAN foreign ministers later today.
They
compared notes on the situation in the DPRK briefly. They also talked
about Iran in preparation for the P-5+1 minus Iran meeting this
afternoon, and about the two-track strategy of diplomacy and pressure.
The Secretary, as she always does, raised human rights concerns –
notably in this particular meeting, concerns about Tibet and increasing
pace of immolations. They talked about bilateral economic relations and
the global financial situation. The Secretary again urged that the –
some of the cases of concerns, including FedEx, be dealt with on the
Chinese side.
And of course, they talked about Syria. The
Secretary debriefed the Foreign Minister on her meeting with Special
Envoy Brahimi, and she made the same point to him, to Foreign Minister
Yang, that she has made this week to Foreign Minister Lavrov and that
she’s made when she was in Vladivostok to Russian leaders, that we still
see value in the Geneva document that the Security Council members
agreed on, and working from that, drawing on elements of it. But if we
go in that direction in terms of the Security Council, there have to be
real consequences for noncompliance with it, consequences for both
sides. So that was the meeting with Foreign Minister Yang.
