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(Xi's U.S. Visit) Interview: Productive Xi-Obama summit generates many areas for cooperation: former envoy

Xinhua, October 3, 2015 Adjust font size:

The recent summit between Chinese President Xi Jinping and his U.S. counterpart Barack Obama was "very productive" and has produced "lots of areas" for cooperation, former U.S. ambassador to China Stapleton Roy told Xinhua recently.

"They actually had very productive meetings," said Roy, a distinguished scholar and founding director emeritus of the Kissinger Institute for Chinese-U.S. Studies at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, commenting on the meetings held at the White House on Sept. 25 between the two leaders during Xi's first state visit to the country.

Roy, who was born in Nanjing, China in 1935 and served as the U.S. ambassador to China from 1991 to 1995, said that the Xi-Obama summit addressed "a whole range of issues" from climate change to Afghanistan and ocean conservancy.

"If you don't follow U.S.-China relations closely, you'd be blown away by the number of areas where we are cooperating with China," Roy said.

Roy noted that the summit produced a "breakthrough" on the most contentious issue of the cyber theft of intellectual property, as the two leaders agreed that such a behavior is a crime and both governments will seek to curb it.

The two leaders agreed to set up a high-level dialogue mechanism on cyber security, with the first meeting scheduled for the end of the year. The dialogue will occur twice a year thereafter.

"We've agreed to set up a senior working group to deal with norms in cyberspace, and we have a senior joint dialogue mechanism to deal with issues of cyber crime. It was an important step forward," Roy said.

On another hot topic of the South China Sea, Roy lauded Xi's commitment not to militarize Nansha Islands, which have been Chinese territory since ancient times and where China has been conducting reclamation activities.

"The president of China said for the first time China has no intention to pursue militarization" of Nansha Islands. "So that's an important development," he said.

Roy said that the U.S. businesses "appreciate those words" spoken by Xi in his speech at a welcome banquet on Sept. 22 in Seattle, Washington state, that China will continue its policy of reform and opening up, and that foreign firms investing in China will be given fair and just treatment.

Roy also mentioned that "lengthy agreements" were reached by the two leaders on dealing with climate change to build on the historic progress they made at their summit in Beijing last November. The two sides pledged to work together to ensure the success of the United Nations Climate Change Conference to be held in Paris in December.

"So it seems to me this summit produced lots of areas where we have things to work with," Roy said, while cautioning against instant results because "Rome wasn't built in a day."

For example, Roy said, cyber security is a very complex issue, as the body of law built up to deal with non-cyber activities is hard to apply to the cyberspace because of the difficulties with attribution. As both governments and non-governmental sectors engage in cyber activities, it is hard to draw the line between them.

"And I think the purpose of the two governments is to expand the areas where we agree, and to manage the areas where we differ. As you look at the results of the summit, that's exactly what we came up with," Roy said.

The veteran China expert said the current election campaign in the United States will not complicate the bilateral relations, nor impact them too much, as history has shown that U.S. presidential candidates, while taking tough positions on China during the campaign, usually did not carry out the policies once elected.

"It's not accidental that four Republican presidents and two Democratic presidents over the past 40 years have all found that trying to expand cooperation with China is in the U.S. national interest," he added. Enditem

Editor's note:

Chinese President Xi Jinping has just wrapped up his first state visit to the United States since taking office in 2013. Xinhua is wiring a series of in-depth stories on China-U.S. relations and the historic visit.

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