“The president will speak directly and forcefully to President Xi during the upcoming visit about cyber issues”, White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Tuesday.
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If taken, the action would be the administration’s first use of an executive order signed by Obama in April to crack down on foreign hackers accused of penetrating USA computer systems.
The White House is supposedly keen to avoid any potential disagreements before a landmark visit by Chinese President Xi Jinping. If China and Russian Federation can not develop acceptable rules of the road, boundaries of acceptable behavior, the US may engage in this battle field just as it did with more traditional weapons during the cold war. The US administration went a step further by indicting five Chinese military officers previous year for alleged cyber theft, and over the past two months it has threatened to launch cyberattacks on China.
Beijing has been blamed for a recent breach of United States federal government personnel files that left millions of officials – including some at the very top levels – exposed.
The White House has declined to publicly name China in the OPM hack.
But he also stressed other areas in which the US and China have cooperated recently, such as with the Iran nuclear deal and efforts to “de-nuclearize” the Korean peninsula.
“A high-standard BIT – with clear provisions providing equal treatment to each country’s investors and a short list of exceptions – is one of the key items that could make an immediate and tangible impact for both of our economies”, they said.
Beijing lawyer Li Jin said that Guo Yushan, founder of the nongovernmental think tank Transition Institute, was released late Monday, but she could not provide details on why he was freed or whether the release had anything to do with Xi’s upcoming meeting with President Barack Obama.
USA officials have expressed worry about China’s maneuvers to claim land in the South China Sea, where half a dozen Asian nations have long engaged in territorial disputes.
Among the signatories are Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett, Apple’s Tim Cook, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs.
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Despite those tiffs, US and China continue to share extensive trade and investment ties.
