The Biden administration’s strategy to curb Beijing faces a stiff challenge as China uses its economic, diplomatic and military might to deflect criticism.
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Tense Talks With China Left U.S. ‘Cleareyed’ About Beijing’s Intentions, Officials Say
The Biden administration’s strategy to curb Beijing faces a stiff challenge as China uses its economic, diplomatic and military might to deflect criticism.
ANCHORAGE — The Biden administration’s first face-to-face encounter with China ended Friday after a vivid demonstration of how the world’s two largest economic and technological powers are facing a widening gulf of distrust and disagreements on a range of issues that will shape the global landscape for years to come.
After an opening session on Thursday marked by mutual public denunciations, the two sides left an Anchorage hotel on Friday without any joint statement of their willingness to work together, even in areas where they both say they share mutual interests, from climate change to rolling back North Korea’s nuclear arsenal.
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken argued that simply hearing how differently President Biden and President Xi Jinping of China, who celebrated a wary friendship a decade ago, were now pursuing their priorities was valuable.
“We certainly know, and knew going in, that there are a number of areas where we are fundamentally at odds,” Mr. Blinken told journalists after the Chinese diplomats left the venue without making any public statements or answering questions. “And it’s no surprise that when we raised those issues, clearly and directly, we got a defensive response.”
The extraordinary rancor aired by China’s top diplomats in Alaska reflected a newly combative and unapologetic China, one increasingly unbowed by diplomatic pressure from American presidential administrations.
Just as Washington’s views on China
have shifted after years of encouraging the country’s economic integration, so have Beijing’s perceptions of the United States and the privileged place in the world that it has long held. The Americans, in their view, no longer have an overwhelming reservoir of global influence, nor the power to wield it against China.
That has made China more confident in pursuing its aims openly and unabashedly — from human rights issues in Hong Kong and Xinjiang to territorial disputes with India and Japan and others in the South China Sea to, most contentiously of all, the fate of Taiwan, the self-governing democracy that China claims as its own.
While China still faces enormous challenges at home and around the world, its leaders now act as if history is on their side.
“This strategic exchange was frank, constructive and helpful,” China’s top diplomat, Yang Jiechi, said in comments broadcast on
Chinese state television. “Of course, there are major disputes between us. China will firmly defend national sovereignty, security and development interests, and China’s development and growing strength are unstoppable.”
Although most of the discussions in Anchorage occurred behind closed doors,
video of the opening session offered ample evidence of the tense start to the meetings. Mr. Yang delivered a 16-minute jeremiad, accusing Mr. Blinken and Jake Sullivan, Mr. Biden’s national security adviser, of condescension and hypocrisy.
China’s more aggressive diplomatic posture is likely to inflame tensions with the United States, which has itself declared China a national security rival. China’s hardening views have already surfaced in activity along its borders and in its surrounding waters, where
it fought Indian troops last year and
menaced ships from several countries, including Japan, Malaysia and Vietnam.
The American delegation, Mr. Blinken said, arrived in Alaska ready to discuss issues that China had viewed as off-limits because they involved the country’s internal affairs. They included American objections to human rights violations against minority Uyghurs in China’s western Xinjiang province — which Mr. Blinken has called a “genocide” — as well as China’s use of a new national security law to suppress political dissent in Hong Kong.
Mr. Blinken and Mr. Sullivan sought to downplay the acrimony that flared in front of television cameras Thursday evening in the opening hour of the two-day event.
“We were cleareyed coming in, we’re cleareyed coming out,” Mr. Sullivan said. “And we will go back to Washington to take stock of where we are.”
Mr. Blinken said a discussion over China’s cyberactivities also evoked a testy response: While the United States has not yet identified any country as responsible for a vast hack of Microsoft Exchange systems, used by tens of thousands of government entities and businesses, Microsoft has said it was a Chinese, state-sponsored operation.
Mr. Blinken said “our interests intersect” on diplomacy with Iran, North Korea and Afghanistan, and on climate change. But there was no statement of joint resolve to cooperate on any of those issues, the sort of diplomatic nicety that routinely seals such high-level meetings.
Afterward, senior Biden administration officials insisted the conversations were useful for providing insight into Beijing’s views, which could help frame a new American strategy for competing with China in a wide range of areas. The officials, who briefed journalists on the condition that they not be identified, described the private talks as civil.
A senior official said Mr. Blinken focused the final talks on Friday on human rights as well as China’s detention of foreigners and its use of a practice known as exit bans to block them from leaving the country.
While this was not the first testy meeting between the Chinese and the Americans, the balance of power between the two countries has changed.
For decades, China approached American governments from positions of weakness, economically and militarily. That forced it at times to accede to American demands, however grudgingly, whether it was to release detained human-rights advocates or to accept Washington’s conditions for joining the World Trade Organization.
China today feels far more assured in its ability to challenge the United States and push for its own vision of international cooperation. It is a confidence embraced by China’s leader since 2012, Xi Jinping, who has
used the phrase, “the East is rising, and the West is declining.”
Beijing’s view has been reinforced by the coronavirus epidemic, which China has
largely tamed at home, and the internal political divisions roiling the United States. Mr. Yang singled both out in his remarks on Thursday.
“The challenges facing the United States in human rights are deep-seated,” Mr. Yang said, citing the Black Lives Matter movement against police brutality. “It’s important that we manage our respective affairs well instead of deflecting the blame on somebody else in this world.”
The shift in China’s strategy is not simply rhetorical, or “grandstanding” for a domestic audience, as a senior official traveling with Mr. Blinken suggested.
On the litany of issues Mr. Blinken raised before and during the talks — from Hong Kong to Xinjiang, from human rights to tech — China’s leaders have refused to give any ground. They have done so despite international criticism and even
intensifying punitive measures imposed by the Trump and, now, Biden administrations.
In the latest round, the State Department announced this week that it would impose sanctions on 24 Chinese officials for their role in eroding Hong Kong’s electoral system. The timing of the move, just as the Chinese were preparing to depart for Alaska, contributed to the acrimony.
“This is not supposed to be the way one welcomes his guests,” China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, said in remarks in Alaska that were as equally pointed as Mr. Yang’s.
The Biden administration’s stated strategy for dealing with China has been to build coalitions of countries to confront and deter its behavior. Mr. Biden’s team has argued that while President Trump correctly diagnosed China as a rising threat, his erratic policies and mistreatment of allies undercut the effort to counter it.
How successful the new strategy will be remains to be seen, but China has in recent years acted as if it were
impervious to outrage over its actions, making the task all the more challenging.
For example, the outpouring of international condemnation last year over the imposition of a
new national security law to restrict dissent in Hong Kong did nothing to halt
a new law this year dismantling the territory’s electoral system.
China also chose Friday to begin
its trials of two Canadians who were arrested more than two years ago and charged with espionage in what was widely seen as retaliation for the American effort to extradite a senior executive from Huawei, the telecommunications giant, for fraud involving sales to Iran.
It was striking that Mr. Yang, a veteran diplomat and a member of the ruling Politburo of the Communist Party of China, used his remarks to say that neither the United States nor the West broadly had a monopoly on international public opinion.
That is a view reflected in
China’s successful efforts to use international forums like the United Nations Human Rights Council to counter condemnation over policies like the mass detention and re-education programs in Xinjiang, the predominately Muslim region in western China.
“I don’t think the overwhelming majority of countries in the world would recognize that the universal values advocated by the United States or that the opinion of the United States could represent international public opinion,” Mr. Yang said. “And those countries would not recognize that the rules made by a small number of people would serve as the basis for the international order.”
Mr. Yang also took issue with Mr. Blinken’s assertion that he had recently heard concerns from American allies about coercive Chinese behavior. He noted that the two countries Mr. Blinken just visited — Japan and South Korea — were China’s second and third biggest trading partners, flaunting the growing sway of its economic might.
The confrontation played well with the domestic audience in China, judging by the reactions on the country’s carefully censored social media sites. “Nowadays, who else but China would dare to put the United States in a corner like this on American territory?” one user on Weibo
wrote approvingly under a video of Mr. Yang’s remarks.
While American officials said the temperature of the meetings in Alaska went down behind closed doors, few officials or experts on either side are hopeful of a significant improvement in relations. “On the whole, this negotiation is only for the two sides to put all the cards on the table, for the two sides to recognize how big and deep each other’s differences are,” said Wu Qiang, an independent political analyst in Beijing, “But in fact, it will not help to bring about any reconciliation or any mitigation.”
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