War Between US and China Inconceivable, Says Senior Beijing Official

Obsession with zero-sum games may result in destruction for all, he warns

- Yew Lun Tian

BEIJING — War between China and the United States is not inevitable and even unthinkable, a senior Communist Party of China (CPC) official has said, in one of Beijing's clearest rejections yet of the notion of conflict between the world's two largest powers.

"People often say that a war between China and the US is inevitable, but I don't think so," Mr Liu Jianchao, head of the party's International Department, told an international audience of current and former foreign policymakers and scholars at the World Peace Forum in Beijing on July 3.

He described Chinese and Americans as peace-loving people and said it would be "inconceivable" that China and the US would want to meet on the battlefield.

"So we advise those politicians who advocate force and admire muscle-flexing to give up their belligerent rhetoric and stop instigating conflicts and contradictions," he said.

Earlier in his opening remarks, he criticised US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth's speech at the Shangri-La Dialogue security forum in Singapore, which marked the first comprehensive articulation of America's Asia policy under President Donald Trump's second term.