China will face consequences for ties with Russia: Biden

Washington, July 12 (PTI) US President Joe Biden on Thursday said China will face consequences for helping Russia in its war against Ukraine and noted that some of the European countries are going to curtail their investment in the eastasian country.

“The issue is that we have to make sure that Xi Jinping understands there's a price to pay for undercutting both the Pacific Basin as well as Europe and as relates to Russia and dealing with Ukraine,” Biden told reporters at a press conference here.

“So for example, if you want to invest in China, you have to have a 51-per cent Chinese owner. You have to make sure that you do by their rules, and provide all access to all the data and information you have,” he sad.

There was a while there, as you recall, the last administration and the others, where the access to that market was enticing enough to get companies to come in because they had access to over a billion people in a market, not a billion but a lot of people in the market, he said.

“So they were doing it, but that got curtailed when we started saying we're going to play by the same rules. For example, the idea that they don't abide by the international rules related to subsidising products by the government funding. So, they're not going to be able to export their electric vehicles to the United States without a significant tariff,” Biden said.

“Others are doing the same thing around the world, but it is a concern. It is a concern that you have both China, I mean North Korea, Russia, Iran countries that are not necessarily coordinated in the past, looking to figure out how they can have an impact,” he said.

Responding to a question, he said he has a strategy to handle China. “I do, but I'm not prepared to talk about the details of it in public. I think you'll see that some of our European friends are going to be curtailing their investment in in China, as long as China continues to have this indirect help to Russia in terms of being able to help their economy, as well as, as well as help them as a consequence of that, their ability to fight in Ukraine,” he said.

“The other thing that we talked a lot about is that, and I raised it and I didn't hear any…I can't swear that everyone agreed because not everyone got to talk about it, but we haven't… we need a new industrial policy in the West,” he said.

“For example, we talked about how both the EU as well as NATO has to be able to begin to build their own munition capacity, has to be able to generate their own capacity to provide for weapons and the ability it came as a surprise to some of us how we had fallen behind in the West in terms of the ability to construct new material, new weaponry, new everything from vehicles to weapon systems,” Biden said.

“So one of the things that came out of this was, we're going to be meeting again with a number of my colleagues, my European colleagues, is what do we do to increase the capacity of the West, particularly in Europe, and Japan to be able to generate the kind of ability to produce their own weapon systems, not just for themselves but to be able to generate that,” Biden said.

“That's what Russia is trying to figure out, then they went to China, and they didn't get the weapons, but then they went to North Korea. But we're going to be in a position where the west is going to become the industrial base for the ability to have all the defensive weapons that we need. That was a discussion, as well,” he told reporters.

Biden said he raised in the NATO summit and others raised the future of China's involvement, what they're going to do, what they're doing with Russia in terms of accommodating, facilitating, they're getting access to additional weapons and they're not supplying weapons themselves.

“They're supplying mechanisms for them to be able to get weapons. …My point is that Xi believes that China is a large enough market that they can entice any country including European countries to invest there, in return for commitments from Europe to do A, B, C or D or not to do certain things,” he said.

“What's happened is we had a long discussion about we have to make clear, China has to understand that if they are supplying Russia with information and capacity, along with working with North Korea and others to help Russia in armament, that they're not going to benefit economically as a consequence of that by getting the kind of investment they're looking for,” Biden said.

“And so for example, we're in a situation where, and we've reestablished direct contact with China after that, remember the balloon, quote, unquote, going down, and all of a sudden, things came to an end? Well, we set up a new mechanism. There's a direct line between XI and me and our military has direct access to one another, and they contact one another when we have problems,” said the president.