US-China clash on rights deepens as talks wrap up
The world's two largest economies were wrapping up two days of wide-ranging meetings, with the United States pressing China to let its currency appreciate further and Beijing seeking an easing of US controls on sensitive exports.
But human rights concerns took
centre-stage in the annual dialogue which comes as China carries out its biggest crackdown in years. Authorities have rounded up dozens of lawyers, writers, artists and other perceived critics.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in some of the sharpest US criticism yet, said that China was wrong if it thought it could hold off change in the wake of the pro-democracy protests sweeping the Arab world.
"They're worried, and they are trying to stop history, which is a fool's errand," Clinton said of Chinese officials in an interview with The Atlantic magazine.
Clinton nonetheless defended the US policy of seeking cooperation with China on a range of global issues, saying: "We live in a real world."
"We don't walk away from dealing with China because we think they have a deplorable human rights record. We don't walk away from dealing with Saudi Arabia," she said.
US officials said Clinton and President Barack Obama, who met the Chinese delegation at the White House on Monday, both raised human rights concerns behind closed doors.
But Vice-Premier Wang Qishan, one of two Chinese officials leading the talks, said that Beijing has frequently tried to explain its views on protest movements to the United States.
"I don't think it is possible for events like the Arab Spring to take place in China," Wang told "The Charlie Rose Show" in a rare foreign television interview.
Wang said that US media offered a limited, distorted picture of China and that Americans are generally drawn first to Europe and secondly to South America.
"It is not easy to really know China because China is an ancient civilization and we are of the Oriental culture," Wang said.
"The United States is the world's number one superpower, and the American people, they're very simple people," he added.
The United States last year launched a drive to ramp up the number of students studying in China. Obama, who was born in Hawaii and grew up partly in Indonesia, has fashioned himself as the first Pacific US president.
Long-running US economic concerns with China came back into focus on Tuesday as official data showed that China's trade surplus ballooned to
US$11.4 billion in April and exports hit a record monthly high.
The trade surplus has been a long source of tension between China and the United States, which accuses Beijing of artificially undervaluing its yuan to fuel a flood of inexpensive manufactured goods for export.
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said that the yuan's value remained a top concern for the United States but recognized that it has risen against the dollar as China tries to tame inflationary pressure.
Wang rejected allegations of currency manipulation, saying that the yuan's value had nothing to do with China's trade boom.
"My biggest worry is that economic relations between China and the United States become politicized," Wang said.
Despite the disagreements, US and Chinese officials say they have made progress in a number of areas to ensure that disagreements do not turn into full-fledged crises.
Military officers are taking part in the annual talks for the first time. China last year snapped defence ties for months after the United States approved a
US$6.4 billion arms package to Taiwan, which Beijing claims.
A senior US official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that the military officers' involvement allowed the Pacific powers to speak frankly about sensitive security issues.
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