“Good luck to everyone and enjoy the game,” he added in the video played at a timeout during the second quarter of the match, where the Wizards emerged as the victors.
Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang previously served as Beijing’s ambassador to the US for 17 months. Photo: AFP
The foreign minister’s remarks came as senior American and Chinese officials have renewed efforts to improve their fraught bilateral relationship of recent years following a summit between President Xi Jinping and his counterpart Joe Biden in Indonesia in November.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Qin’s American counterpart, will travel to China next month.
Earlier this week US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Chinese Vice-Premier Liu He met in Switzerland, where they agreed Yellen would visit China soon and a reciprocal Chinese visit would be arranged to the US.
In a call with Blinken on January 1 to bid farewell before vacating his ambassadorship, Qin expressed hope of continuing close working relations with America’s top diplomat for a better Sino-US relationship.
Beijing in 2023 would “promote coordination and sound interactions among major countries”, Qin said in a Lunar New Year video message to foreign diplomats in China on Friday. He called on the international community to reject “the outdated Cold War mentality”.
Blinken last week said the Biden administration would do all it could to establish guardrails to prevent competition with Beijing from veering into conflict.
But the rival powers have still agreed to keep lines of communication open, and there has remained room for coordinated efforts in areas like macroeconomics and climate change.
Qin’s virtual appearance marked the first time he had faced the American public since being promoted to lead the Chinese foreign ministry at the end of December. His predecessor, Wang Yi, is now Xi’s top foreign policy adviser.
In early January, days after taking up his new position, Qin wrote in a Washington Post opinion piece that “the future of the entire planet” depended on a healthy and stable China-US relationship. He urged the two countries to find the “right way” to get along.
His presence at a National Basketball Association game extended a tradition between the US and China of enlisting sports to advance their relations.
An exchange of table-tennis players in the early 1970s cleared the path for President Richard Nixon’s historic visit to China and his meeting with Chinese leader Mao Zedong. The overture, later described as “ping-pong diplomacy”, helped the countries reestablish ties.
And in September, Qin threw the first pitch at a St Louis Cardinals game, and he later interacted with Nicholas Burns, the US ambassador to Beijing, on Twitter on the topic of baseball.
The last public appearance Qin made in the US before he left his position in Washington also came at a Wizards game. On December 27, he sank two shots on the home team’s court before a game with the Philadelphia 76ers, dressed in a business suit.
Qin tweeted that day of a “special relationship” with the Wizards, who were the first NBA team to visit China in 1979 after diplomatic relations were restored.
He recalled that experience in the video message on Saturday, noting that he “spent a wonderful evening watching a fabulous game”.
“Today I am glad to join you again in celebrating the Chinese New Year,” he said.
But American pro basketball has not fully escaped political controversy. Until last March, Chinese state television refused to broadcast NBA games for more than two years, with the exception of a 2020 finals game, after then-Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey’s tweet in 2019 voicing support for Hong Kong protesters.
