US Foreign Minister Mike Pompeo will meet with senior Chinese official Yang Jiechi in Hawaii on Wednesday, resuming dialogue after the extreme tensions that pitted the world's top two powers at the height of the pandemic, several media reported. The principle of an upcoming meeting between the American secretary of state and a Chinese counterpart in the American Pacific archipelago was first mentioned by the newspaper Politico.
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The Hong Kong daily South China Morning Post said on Monday, citing an anonymous source, that it would take place on Wednesday with Yang Jiechi, the top official in the Chinese Communist Party for foreign policy. The US State Department did not comment. The Chinese Foreign Ministry confined itself to saying that the two countries had "maintained their communication". The two men last officially spoke on April 15. Since then, Sino-US relations have deteriorated further. Mike Pompeo is on the front line to denounce the management of the new coronavirus by China.
He accuses Beijing of having initially concealed the extent and gravity of the Covid-19 disease, and therefore of being responsible for its spread throughout the world, which has claimed the lives of more than 430,000 people, including more than 116,000 in the United States. United States, and forced countries to shut down their economies. Worse, he openly said he believed that the virus, although of natural origin, could have accidentally escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan, the Chinese city where it was first reported in late 2019. China rejects these accusations. US President Donald Trump has promised to take retaliatory action against China for its role in this "global mass killing."
In mid-May, he even threatened to sever relations with the Asian giant, and assured that he no longer wished to speak to his counterpart Xi Jinping, who had been presented as a "friend" until then. Relations that were already icy were further cooled when the Chinese authorities imposed a security law on Hong Kong, considered by Washington to be the act of death of the autonomy status of the former British colony. Mike Pompeo immediately opened the way to a progressive questioning of the preferential status that the United States granted to the territory. But the subjects of litigation are even more numerous, from the trade war to human rights through the American accusations of militarization of the South China Sea.