US-China Cooperative Relationship Is Growing Fast

It’s a great pleasure for me to be back at Texas AM and to participate in this very important conference. It really is an honor to join this conference which will explore the past, note the present, but, most importantly, look to the future. As the caliber of the conference participants, the scope of the agenda and the composition of the audience attest, the Sino-US relationship is both compelling as it is complex. It is growing, and it is not just growing in a bilateral sense. Increasingly, our relationship is of a global nature. So many others participated in the development of this relationship. You’ve heard some of them mentioned in the course of the proceedings so far. But there are too many distinguished participants that I cannot stop and individually single them out. But one person deserves special mention, and that’s my good friend sitting behind me, Henry Kissinger. History records that Henry was one of the principal American and Chinese architects of a new epoch in US-China relations. Henry, without Tag Heuer Replica Watches the rapprochement that you and President Nixon brilliantly achieved with your Chinese counterparts, a conference such as this might yet be something in the distant future. Both countries owe you, Mr Secretary, my dear friend, a tremendous debt of gratitude. Sir, we thank you. To this day, many matters of principle remain unresolved between China and the United States. We cannot and will not ignore them. And the purpose of this conference is for us to speak candidly to one another about differences and about areas of agreement, to speak to each other as friends. Yet, in a world where faithful friends and former foes confront a host of challenges, the United States sees an even greater need to shape a relationship with China that is defined by our mutual interests, not by those areas of disagreement.
That is the kind of relationship President Bush has sought to build with China. And we know that China shares that goal.

Realizing the great promise of such a relationship will not be easy, but it is all the more vital because of the choices that China has made for itself. A rapidly growing China chose to join the world economy and is adopting the rules of the World Trade Organization.

And China is beginning to assert a leadership role in political and security matters and issues as a responsible permanent member of the Security Council. Any one of these new developments would be enough to cause us to seek a more enduring relationship with China.

But the road to that more enduring relationship is not always easy. In April of 2001, shortly after I became Secretary of State, a Chinese fighter collided with one of our reconnaissance planes. We wondered if that incident would bring down the hope of a productive relationship along with our aircraft. Many people worried. Many people said it’s just like the old days. It was an early test of both leaderships. Our bilateral relationship Replica Watches weathered the storm. In fact, we learned a lot from that crisis. And I believe that American and Chinese actions during that two-week period actually paved the way for dramatic improvements in our relationship. Out of adversity, often opportunity presents itself.

Since then, the United States and China relations have been on the upswing, always going up. There have been no further dips. It is a relationship characterized by frequency of contacts, those important personal contacts that President Bush mentioned in his opening remarks.

Our two Presidents have had an unprecedented four meetings in just the past two years. I have met with my Chinese Foreign Minister Colleague and friend and counterpart, Foreign Minister Li, five times in the past two months. We talk on the phone all the time. Four of my cabinet colleagues –Treasury Secretary Snow, Health and Human Omega Speedmaster Replica Services Secretary Thompson, Commerce Secretary Evans, and US Trade Representative Zo? lick — have all been in Beijing within the past eight weeks. And in Washington last week, Secretary Rumsfeld and I met with the Chinese Defense Minister.

High-level meetings are becoming so frequent. They are no longer treated as news or high drama by the media. Rightly so, because the “real” news is what we do together, not merely the fact that we meet.

North Korea is a vivid example of what we do together and how the United States and China are cooperating and working together in ways that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.