Congressional exchanges between China and the United States have
played an important role in promoting mutual trust and
understanding, a prominent Chinese lawmaker said in Washington on
Thursday.
Zeng Jianhui, a National People's Congress of China (NPC) Standing
Committee member and chairman of the NPC's Foreign Affairs
Committee, said with common efforts by both sides in recent years,
the NPC and the US Congress have successfully established a system
of exchange.
This system shows that the US Congress attaches great importance to
exchange and cooperation with the NPC, said Zeng, who is currently
visiting the United States as the head of a NPC delegation at the
invitation of the US-China Inter-parliamentary Exchange Group.
"Through exchanges the two sides have enhanced mutual trust and
understanding, narrowed differences and reached common ground in
many fields,'' Zeng said.
Zeng told reporters that during his talks on Wednesday with US
House Speaker Dennis Hastert and chairman of the US House
International Relations Committee, Henry J. Hyde, both countries
stressed common ground, and expressed their hopes of strengthening
cooperation between the two countries in trade, counter-terrorism
and the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons.
Both sides agreed that the Sino-US relationship is one of the most
important in international relations and hoped that the two
countries would maintain the recent momentum in bilateral
relations, he said.
In
response to questions on Taiwan, Zeng said the Taiwan issue is the
most important and sensitive issue between China and the United
States. He warned that US arms sales to Taiwan and the upgrading of
military relations with the island would send a wrong signal to
Taiwan authorities.
In
1999, Hastert instructed his House of Representatives to establish
the US-China Inter-parliamentary Exchange Group, which is one of
only four official inter-parliamentary exchange groups between the
United States and other countries. As a reciprocal gesture, the NPC
created the Sino-US Inter-parliamentary Exchange Group, with Zeng
serving as its chairman, in December 1999.
(China
Daily June 8, 2002)