Interview with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton - cont.

A: Well I think that we all want China's remarkable rise to be a peaceful one. We want China to compete peacefully in the economy and the political arena, and therefore the more we involve China in the work we're doing and in organizations like ASEAN, the more opportunities we'll have to create a positive framework for not just China's future but Asia's future. Now I know that a lot of China's neighbors have expressed concerns so we certainly want to strengthen our relationship with a lot of countries that are in east and southeast Asia but what we hope is we all can work together and that China remains focused on raising the economic well-being of their people and competing in the marketplace. That's our goal, we will be starting a significant and strategic economic dialogue with China on Monday, which I will lead along with our Treasury Secretary, so we want to explore areas of cooperation. And I think there are some, obviously we were very pleased to get the cooperation of China with respect to North Korea, which is important because they have a border with North Korea and they have long-standing ties with North Korea and we want to look in other areas to deepen that cooperation.

Q: Some critics said you were too soft on China on the human rights issue.

A: No what I said was, we will always have human rights as a key part of our foreign policy and I raised the tough issues on Tibet and Taiwan, religious persecution, but that's not all our relationship is about. And I think it's important to have a more comprehensive relationship. The Chinese know what we're going to say about Tibet and Taiwan, there's no surprises there. We believe they should allow more autonomy for the Tibetan people, they should respect Tibet's cultural and religious traditions, they should have a dialogue with the Dalai Lama and his representatives. They know what we're going to say about Taiwan, which is that every intention of following the policies between the United States and China several years ago, and that is the one-China policy and we understand that. But we also have relations in the economic sphere and defense with Taiwan. They know we're going to say all that. So it doesn't help our relationship to broaden if we just come and say the same thing and they say the same thing back and we don't talk about education, health care, the economy, the political challenges we face. So my goal was to try to make sure we had a broader base. It's a broader approach that takes along some of the tried and true but tries to also pick out some new areas. (Did you take a new approach from the Chinese side too?) I think our relations in the last six months have been very positive, now we do disagree, there's no doubt about that, but I think we'll find in this strategic and economic dialogues stating Monday that the Chinese are very willing to talk with us as we are with them to see as many areas of agreements as possible.

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