Blinken and a Top Chinese Official in Talks on U.S.-China Tensions

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken pressed his Chinese counterpart Saturday on areas of sharp disagreement between the two nations, including China’s support of Russia’s military industrial sector, the State Department said in a statement.

Mr. Blinken met with the Chinese official, Wang Yi, on the sidelines of an annual international conference of Southeast Asian nations in the Laotian capital of Vientiane. Also in attendance was Sergey V. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, who at one group session blamed the United States for provoking Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, a senior State Department official told reporters traveling with Mr. Blinken.

In their meeting, Mr. Wang listened to Mr. Blinken’s criticisms, but pointed out that China has not sent weapons to Russia, said the State Department official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly describe diplomatic talks.

President Biden and his aides have recently accused China of helping Russia rebuild its defense industrial sector, mainly through the export to Russia by Chinese companies of machine tools and microelectronics that have helped the Russian army persist in its war in Ukraine.

Mr. Blinken told Mr. Wang that defending Ukraine against Russia’s aggression was a “core interest” of the United States, using a term that Chinese officials often deploy to signal their own national priorities, the State Department official said.

The U.S. government has imposed sanctions on more than 300 Chinese entities as a result, but the Chinese government still has not curbed the exports, the official said. He added that Mr. Blinken presented specific examples of the exports, though the official declined to go into detail on that part of the conversation.