WASHINGTON — China’s ambassador to the US has specified four topics that Beijing expects President Trump to avoid during Xi Jinping‘s state visit this week — while a Senate Republican foreign policy buff bashed the “lavish welcome” planned for the Chinese president. Xie Feng, in an op-ed for the official People’s Daily newspaper, wrote that “China’s sovereignty, security, and development interests cannot be violated, and four red lines — the Taiwan question, democracy and human rights, development paths and systems, and development rights — cannot be challenged.”
Xi continually pressed the issue of Taiwan, the self-governing, democratic island that China claims as its own, when he and Trump met in Beijing back in May, causing their scheduled meeting to run long. The Trump administration shrugged off Xi’s attempt to buttonhole Trump on the topic, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio telling “NBC Nightly News” at the time that “US policy on the issue of Taiwan is unchanged as of today and as of the meeting that we had here.” “It was raised,” Rubio went on. “They always raise it on their side. We always make clear our position and we move on to the other topics.”
