China’s Foreign Minister Qin Gang to attend G20 meeting in India

China confirmed on Tuesday that Foreign Minister Qin Gang will attend the Group of 20 (G20) Foreign Ministers meeting in India, according to Reuters. China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Mao Ning, stated during a press conference,  “The G20 should focus on prominent challenges in the global economy. China stands ready to work with all parties to ensure the G20 foreign ministers’ meeting sends a positive signal on multilateralism.”

The G20 Foreign Ministers Meeting (FMM) is scheduled to take place in New Delhi on March 1-2, 2023, under India’s presidency. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is expected to speak to the foreign ministers of the G20 member countries about India’s growing global influence.

The G20 foreign ministers will meet on March 1-2, just days after the bloc’s finance chiefs meet in Bengaluru. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and UK Foreign Secretary James Cleverly will all attend the meeting in New Delhi.

In total, 40 countries, including non-G20 members invited by India, and multilateral organisations will be represented. Mao also commented on the White House’s decision to set a deadline for removing TikTok from federal devices.

“US is overstretching concept of national security, abusing state power to suppress foreign companies, we firmly oppose those wrong actions,” she added.

The White House gave federal agencies 30 days on Monday (local time) to remove the Chinese-owned app TikTok from all government-issued devices.
The directive comes after Congress banned the popular video-sharing app TikTok from federal government devices and systems in December, citing concerns that TikTok’s parent company ByteDance could give the Chinese Communist Party access to user data, according to the New York Post (NYP).

Before Congress’s December vote, several government agencies, including the White House, Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, and the State Department, had preemptively banned TikTok from government devices.

Meanwhile, TikTok, which is owned by ByteDance, has stated that the concerns are unfounded and that the app is not being used to spy on Americans. ByteDance denied sharing user data with the CCP, calling the concerns “misinformation,” according to NYP.

The US action follows the Canadian government’s decision to block the short-form video app TikTok from official electronic devices. The ban is set to go into effect on Tuesday, according to CNN. According to a statement issued by the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, government-issued devices will be barred from downloading TikTok, and existing installations of the app will be removed.