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China to lessen dependence on US, but needs time, says Lavrov

The Russian foreign minister also noted that these mechanisms and tools should be developed that would not be able to be devised overnight

MOSCOW, February 2. /TASS/. China will inevitably begin to cut back its dependence on the United States, but it will need time to develop the necessary tools, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an interview with TV news anchor Dmitry Kiselyov on Thursday.

"We are not as deeply immersed in this system [of globalization] as China is, at least in terms of volume of trade, American securities that the Chinese <...> bought. So, the depth of China's immersion in the current system, of course, is not comparable to ours. However, I have no doubt that China will inevitably begin to reduce this dependence, and has already begun to scale it down," Lavrov said.

"All the evidence points to that effect. China will need more time to create parallel instruments, mechanisms that will protect it against the arbitrariness of the United States as the main manager of the global monetary and financial trading system at this stage," the foreign minister added.

Lavrov also noted that these mechanisms and tools should be developed that would not be able to be devised overnight, "since this could trigger very serious economic shocks, given the interconnectedness between the economies of the United States and China. "But the process of not just discussing, but finding ways to form new mechanisms has gotten off the ground, and it is going in the direction of, you might say, the fragmentation of global mechanisms, because as long as global mechanisms are associated with the US and its satellites, they are no longer global, they serve a group of states," he stressed.