Ambassador Cui Tiankai took an interview with Fareed Zakaria GPS at CNN

On February 6, Chinese Ambassador to the United States Cui Tiankai took an interview with Fareed Zakaria GPS at CNN on China-US relations, COVID-19, national security law for Hong Kong, Xinjiang-related issues and more. The interview was aired on February 7. Here is the full transcript of the interview:

Zakaria: With me, now, Beijing's representative in Washington. Ambassador Cui Tiankai has been China's ambassador to the United States since 2013. He received a master's degree from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in 1987, and he walked his way up through China's Foreign Ministry all the way to the job ever since. Ambassador Cui, a pleasure to have you back on.

Ambassador Cui: Good morning, Fareed. So nice to see you.

Zakaria: We have that statement of President Biden in the speech. We also had an exchange of readouts, of descriptions of phone call that took place between America's top diplomat Antony Blinken and China's top diplomat Yang Jiechi. It all seems pretty tough, and even the readouts have a lot of more tough language in them. Were you expecting a different start to the Biden foreign policy? It seems as though Yang Jiechi, China's top diplomat, said that the four years of the Trump administration had been the lowest point in US-China relations since the opening to China in the Nixon administration. Do you think there is a new atmosphere in Washington, or does it feel too more like the Biden administration is continuing some of Donald Trump's hardline policies?

Ambassador Cui: Fareed, I think there are a few basic things here. So let me try to make my points one by one. First of all, China's development, China's growth, has been made possible by the hard work of the Chinese people and our more than 40 years of reform and opening-up. This is a historical fact. To say otherwise is against the facts and certainly not fair to the Chinese people. Internationally, China always stands for the basic norms governing international relations as embodied in the purposes and principles of the United Nations Charter. We always support multilateral institutions, the international system centered on the United Nations, including, for instance, the WHO, the WTO and a number of others. We already contribute more troops than other permanent members of the Security Council to the UN peacekeeping operations. We are already contributing a great deal to the global economic growth. We're ready to do more. For instance, we're working with a number of other countries to confront the current pandemic, to restore economic growth globally. And hopefully and I believe there is such a need and potential for bilateral relations between China and the United States in all these areas, especially vis-à-vis the emerging or the existing global challenges, like climate change.

For the readout for the phone call yesterday, frankly, my impression is that this readout still shows the example of power rather than the power of example. You don't have an effective foreign policy just by talking tough or playing tough. This is not the right way of doing diplomacy. I think there is a clear need for good sense of mutual respect. People have to show good will and good faith. Of course, all countries have values and interests to defend. For China, national sovereignty, unity, territorial integrity, these are the core values and core interests we will defend, we will do whatever it takes to defend, no matter who says what.

Zakaria: But let me ask you, in some ways, this new tougher foreign policy, which has become a consensus, and there are something like 400 pieces of legislation in the House, in the United States Congress, that are aimed at, in some way, standing up to China. This new toughness comes in some part as a response to a new Chinese foreign policy, which has been itself much more aggressive. And you don't have to listen to the United States on this. If you ask the Australians, they find themselves facing a much more assertive China that is asking that Australian private think tanks do not do research that the Chinese government does not like. You find it when you talk to the Indians who feel that China made incursions on a disputed border along the Himalayas. You find it in Japan where they think that China has pushed further its claims on the Senkaku Islands in various ways. And of course you find it with Taiwan, Vietnam. So this is something that, this sense that China is flexing its muscles, is not one just felt in the United States. Is there a reason for this new Chinese foreign policy?