China has decided not to hold a foreign ministers meeting with Japan on the fringes of ASEAN-related gatherings in Phnom Penh on Thursday, the Chinese government said, describing it as fallout from U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan.
Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said in a news briefing that the Group of Seven industrialized nations, including Japan, unreasonably blamed China in a statement issued Wednesday by their foreign ministers following Pelosi's visit.
Japanese Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi and his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi had been arranging to hold talks on the sidelines of a series of meetings related to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in the Cambodian capital, according to Japanese sources.
It would have been the first face-to-face dialogue between the foreign ministers of the two East Asian neighbors since November 2020 and would have come amid mounting U.S.-China tensions over Taiwan, following this week's visit by Pelosi to the self-ruled democratic island, which Beijing regards as a renegade province.
In the G7 statement, the foreign ministers said they are "concerned by recent and announced threatening actions" by China, particularly live-fire exercises and economic coercion.
"There is no justification to use a visit as pretext for aggressive military activity in the Taiwan Strait," they said, warning that Beijing's "escalatory response risks increasing tensions and destabilizing the region.
"We call on the PRC not to unilaterally change the status quo by force in the region," the G7 said, using the acronym of the People's Republic of China, the country's official name.
The other G7 members are the U.K., Canada, France, Germany, Italy and the United States plus the European Union.