China plays down Steve Bannon's predictions of war with US

Extract from The Guardian

Wang Yi dismisses Trump strategist’s comments, saying any ‘sober-minded politician’ would know both would lose out

Wang Yi with his Australian counterpart Julie Bishop at Parliament House in Canberra on Tuesday. Photograph: Mark Graham/AFP/Getty Images

Gareth Hutchens

Tuesday 7 February 2017 22.28 AEDT 

The Chinese foreign minister has taken a swipe at Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s chief strategist, for predicting China and the US will eventually go to war.
He said any “sober-minded politician” would understand that both sides would lose from such a conflict.
China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, met the Australian foreign minister, Julie Bishop, in Canberra on Tuesday to discuss trade and security arrangements. In a press conference afterwards, he was asked if he was concerned about a possible war between China and the US, given the Trump administration has signalled it wants to take a stronger and more aggressive stance towards Beijing, and Bannon last year predicted the two nations would go to war over the South China Sea.

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It emerged last week that Bannon, during a radio show hosted on the far-right website Breitbart in March 2016, predicted the US would go to war in the South China Sea “in five to 10 years”.
“There’s no doubt about that,” he said. “They’re taking their sandbars and making basically stationary aircraft carriers and putting missiles on those. They come here to the United States in front of our face – and you understand how important face is – and say it’s an ancient territorial sea.”

Wang dismissed concerns of war on Tuesday, saying “irrational statements” had often been made about China-US relations in the last four decades. “But such statements aside, the China-US relationship has defied all kinds of difficulties and has been moving forward continuously,” he said.
“Any sober-minded politician, they clearly recognise that there cannot be conflict between China and the United States because both will lose, and both sides cannot afford that.”
He said what mattered were the comments from the Trump administration, not the comments that members of the administration may have made in the past.
Rex Tillerson, during his confirmation hearing in January to become US secretary of state, said China should be barred from the artificial islands it had built in the South China Sea.
“We’re going to have to send China a clear signal that, first, the island-building stops and, second, your access to those islands also is not going to be allowed,” he said. “They are taking territory or control or declaring control of territories that are not rightfully China’s.”
His comments encouraged the former Australian prime minister Paul Keating to issue a public statement castigating Tillerson for warmongering.
“Tillerson’s claim that China’s control of access to the waters would be a threat to ‘the entire global economy’ is simply ludicrous,” Keating said. “No country would be more badly affected than China if it moved to impede navigation.”

Tillerson was confirmed as secretary of state last week.