After 10 hours of meetings with Chinese officials in Beijing, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen announced at a press conference that the two countries would work to improve talks despite “significant differences”.

There has been no major progress in easing tensions between the two countries, but the mere dialogue has raised hopes of reaching a consensus formula to avert the risk of conflict, the newspaper said. The New York Times.

Yellen’s visit to China comes amid hopes that the United States can restart a relationship that has soured for years amid notable flashpoints, including the war in Ukraine, the downing of a Chinese spy balloon by the U.S. military and increased trade restrictions between the two countries. Countries.

After 10 hours of meetings over two days in Beijing, Yellen said at a press conference on Sunday that she believed the US and China were still on solid ground despite their “huge differences”.

“We believe the world is big enough for both our countries to prosper,” he added.

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Describing it as “one of the most important relations of our time”, the minister announced that the two sides would have frequent contacts at the highest levels.

Yellen’s visit comes weeks after Secretary of State Anthony Blinken visited Beijing to meet with senior Chinese officials.

According to the New York Times, the US President’s special envoy for climate change, John Kerry, will visit China soon to resume talks on global warming.

Analysts see the willingness for further dialogue as an important development, as the New York Times notes that “the two countries are beginning to talk about their differences after months of silence.”

L said that the two governments gave favorable assessments of the two-day meetings and agreed to hold further talks.Wall Street Journal.

“My goal is to make sure that we do not engage in a series of unplanned expansionary actions that harm our overall economic relationship with each other,” Yellen said Sunday on CBS News.

Yellen’s chief Chinese interlocutor, Vice Premier He Lifeng, expressed concern about US sanctions, but said the two sides “agreed to maintain exchanges and contacts,” according to an official statement.

He Weiwen, a former Chinese Ministry of Commerce official who is now a senior fellow at the China and Globalization Center in Beijing, welcomed Yelin’s view that China and the United States could prosper.

“China and the United States have deep differences, so continued and direct exchanges are not only constructive but critically important,” he told the New York Times.

No perceptible relief

However, according to the New York Times, economic tensions are unlikely to ease significantly.

Yellen returned to Washington on Sunday with no announcement of progress or deals to mend the lingering rift between the two countries.

The secretary said the Biden administration is deeply concerned about many of China’s business practices and policies that the United States views as attempts at economic coercion, including its holdings of foreign companies.

The Treasury secretary said she had discussed the Trump administration’s tariffs on Chinese imports, and while Yellen criticized the tariffs as ineffective, she indicated the administration would not make a decision on tariffs until an internal review of them was complete. .

In the first trip by a US Treasury secretary in four years, Yellen met with four powerful Chinese leaders involved in economic policymaking under President Xi Jinping: Premier Li Keqiang, Vice Premier He Living and Finance Minister Liu Kun, and President of the People’s Bank of China, Ban Gongsheng.

Hours before Yellen’s press conference in China, the Xinhua news agency published a report on her visit that described the talks as constructive but also highlighted what China sees as key areas of disagreement.

The report revealed China’s continued objections to the Biden administration’s insistence on protecting US national security through trade restrictions.

“China believes that generalizing national security is not conducive to normal economic and trade exchanges,” Xinhua said. “The Chinese side has expressed concern over US sanctions and restrictive measures against China,” he added.

The Chinese and US economies represent about 40 percent of total world economic output and are partners in many ways, and they trade in a very large number of important commodities.

Yellen, according to the newspaper, acknowledged Chinese concerns about U.S. restrictions on investment in China and said she tried to explain that such measures would narrowly target certain sectors and not have a broader impact on the Chinese economy.

Chinese officials and experts worry that the administration’s efforts to limit China’s access to certain technologies could slow the growth of high-potential industries such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing.