Marco Rubio meets China’s Wang Yi at the ASEAN summit as South China Sea tensions and US-China disputes dominate talks
MANILA: US Secretary of State Marco Rubio will meet his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi on Wednesday on the sidelines of an ASEAN summit in Manila, a State Department official said.
The meeting comes against the backdrop of US condemnation of Beijing’s manoeuvres in the contested South China Sea, and US President Donald Trump’s claims that China meddled with American election data.
Rubio and Wang are both in Manila for a meeting of foreign ministers of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).
The two met last year on the sidelines of an ASEAN gathering in Kuala Lumpur and again in Munich in February.
Rubio heralded Washington’s commitment to “freedom of navigation in Southeast Asia” in an op-ed published in Philippine media outlets on Tuesday, while reaffirming the US defensive umbrella in the region.
Beijing claims sovereignty over almost the entire South China Sea, a vital global trade route, despite an international ruling that its claims have no legal basis.
Philippine and Chinese sailors clashed at the Second Thomas Shoal in the South China Sea on Monday in what was the first serious seaborne encounter in months.
Shortly after Rubio arrived in the Philippines, the United States slammed what it called China’s “dangerous and aggressive” actions, calling on Beijing to halt its “destabilising conduct”.
Wang is also expected to meet his Philippines counterpart on Wednesday.
Rubio and Wang are likely to discuss the situation in the Middle East but also Trump’s recent claims that Beijing illicitly acquired 220 million US voter files during the 2020 election cycle — something China called “pure fabrications”.
Before his departure from Washington on Sunday, Rubio refused to say if he would specifically raise the election issue with Wang.
“Those are delicate matters,” Rubio told reporters. “We’ll see how the meeting goes. We’ll talk about things that are important, certainly.”
The US secretary of state also said on Sunday that he expected Chinese President Xi Jinping to visit the United States in September, after Trump’s trip to China last spring.
