China loomed large on the agenda when foreign ministers from Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States sat down in London this week for the first face-to-face G7 meeting for two years.

The gathering, experts said, will have done little to persuade China that the world's leading industrialized powers are not out to get it. And the fact that the UK, the holder of the rotating G7 presidency, invited India, the Republic of Korea, South Africa and Australia may have added to that feeling.

UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab told the BBC that the gathering on Tuesday and Wednesday "demonstrates that diplomacy is back".

The talks on Tuesday reportedly started with an hour-and-a-half session about China, and half-hour sessions on Myanmar, Syria, Libya and Afghanistan. A separate discussion covering Russia, Ukraine and Belarus reportedly lasted 90 minutes.

Reuters reported that an unnamed US official said at a news briefing after the first day: "China was the dominant topic today. We opened with it because it was the most important agenda item for us, out of the many important things that we had to discuss."

The official added that all participants said nations must counter challenges arising from China's economic growth. He said they also resolved not to attempt to contain Beijing, or to escalate tension.

The US has in recent years pressured some of its allies to take moves against the overseas growth of Chinese enterprises, such as telecom giant Huawei. It has also joined hands with some Western countries to accuse China of violating human rights in places such as its Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region.

The Chinese government said that they have built their accusations on fabrications and lies that are not supported by any solid evidence and they are attempting to thwart China's normal development.

The London meeting is likely to culminate in the release of a communique from US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and his counterparts that sources say will include a call for the Chinese province of Taiwan to be invited to join international organizations, including the World Health Organization.

The editor-in-chief of China's Global Times newspaper, Hu Xijin, wrote in response that G7 ministers should not meddle in China's affairs.

"I couldn't help but say that they are the most good-for-nothing elite since the end of WWII, because they have abandoned a basic sense of shame and do not seek truth based on facts," he wrote.

Blinken insisted in an interview with the Financial Times that Washington is not obsessed with "trying to contain China, or to hold China down".

"What we are about is upholding the international rules-based order that we've invested so much in over many decades, that has served us well, but not just us," he said. "We think, for all its imperfections, it's served the world pretty well."

He said "anyone who takes action that would disrupt that order", or who seeks to undermine it, will be opposed.

The BBC said on Wednesday that UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Blinken met privately in London to discuss the "close alignment" of the UK and US.

A spokeswoman for the UK prime minister said they agreed to collaborate on tackling the novel coronavirus as well as on trade and defense.

The Guardian newspaper reported that the G7 ministers were expected to talk on Wednesday about a range of challenges, including climate change and the pandemic.

Earlier, Blinken rejected claims that Washington wants a new Cold War with Beijing.

Speaking a few days after former veteran US diplomat Henry Kissinger warned that a failure to resolve US-China tension could cause serious problems, Blinken told the Financial Times: "I resist putting labels on most relationships, including this one, because it's complex … And when I look at the relationship, I see adversarial aspects. I see competitive aspects. I see cooperative aspects: all three."

Blinken said the US should engage with China from "a position of strength", something Beijing has rejected.

While speaking with Blinken on March 18, during their first face-to-face meeting, China's top diplomat Yang Jiechi, a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and director of the Office of the Foreign Affairs Commission of the CPC Central Committee, said: "In front of the Chinese side, the US does not have the qualification to say that it wants to speak to China from a position of strength.

"The US side was not even qualified to say such things even 20 years or 30 years back, because this is not the way to deal with the Chinese people," he added.

Speaking on Tuesday, Blinken said the US recognizes that countries may have close ties with both Beijing and Washington.

"We're not asking countries to choose," he said. "We recognize that countries have complicated relationships, including with China, including economic relationships. And the issue is not that those need to be cut off or ended."

He spoke against the backdrop of ties between the world's two largest economies plunging to a low point under the previous US administration, and, after three months of the Biden administration, not significantly improving.

'Biggest problem'

Kissinger said earlier that strained ties between China and the US are "the biggest problem for America, the biggest problem for the world".

"If we can't solve that, then the risk is that, all over the world, a kind of Cold War will develop between China and the United States," said the 97-year-old former US secretary of state at the McCain Institute's Sedona Forum on global issues on Friday.

Kissinger said countries now have technology that could not be imagined 70 years ago.

"For the first time in human history, humanity has the capacity to extinguish itself in a finite period of time," he said.

Kissinger said the US "must be in constant dialogue with China" and make clear what the red lines are, while working to avoid conflicts.

"This is the complex task we have. Nobody has yet succeeded doing it completely," he said. "But that is the essence of the relationship. That's the challenge the administration now has."