To old friend in Iowa, Xi says world requires stability in China-US ties
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Mr Xi Jinping speaking at the home of Ms Sarah Lande (second from left) and her husband Roger in Muscatine, Iowa, on Feb 15, 2012.
PHOTO: REUTERS
BEIJING – Chinese President Xi Jinping, in a recent reply to a letter from an Iowa native whom he first met nearly four decades ago, said the world’s future demanded stability in Sino-US ties, according to Chinese state media on Jan 10.
Bilateral ties have sagged in recent years, undermined by a trade war and a plethora of other issues, including the origins of Covid-19.
Communications between the countries have improved since Mr Xi’s talks with US President Joe Biden in San Francisco in November 2023, but both sides remain tense over self-governing Taiwan, which China regards as its territory to be reunified with it.
Taiwan, which rejects China’s sovereignty claims, is electing a new president on Jan 13.
“China and the United States are the largest developing and developed countries in the world, and the future and destiny of this planet require Sino-US relations to be more stable, to be better,” Mr Xi told Ms Sarah Lande, whom he first met in May 1985.
The two became acquainted when Mr Xi, then 31, led a delegation from China’s northern Hebei province to its “sister state” Iowa to learn about US food production.
In 2012, they reunited in Ms Lande’s home town of Muscatine, and once more in San Francisco in November 2023, when Ms Lande attended a dinner hosted for Mr Xi.
In a previous letter to Ms Lande in 2022, he told her and his “old friends” in Iowa to “continue sowing the seeds of friendship and make new contributions to the friendship between the Chinese and American peoples”.
Just as bilateral ties had worsened in recent years, the image of China in the US had deteriorated.
In early 2020, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman said on Twitter that the coronavirus might have emerged from the United States, and that it might have reached Wuhan, where the virus was first detected, via the World Military Games held there.
In 2023, in a poll by the Pew Research Centre, 83 per cent of respondents in the United States held an unfavourable opinion of China.
Asked to name the country that posed the greatest threat to the United States, Americans perceived China as both an economic and national security threat, the US think-tank said.
Repairing its image is paramount to Beijing, especially in the United States. Washington has levied additional tariffs on Chinese goods and imposed curbs on exports of certain technologies, such as advanced chips, to China. REUTERS
