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| Photo: pool/Reuters |
A lecture in Alaska shows that adversaries sense U.S. weakness
That was some tongue lashing a senior Chinese official delivered last week in Anchorage to top Biden Administration officials in their first meeting. This is the new reality in U.S.-China relations, as adversaries look to see if they can exploit President Biden as they did Barack Obama.
The two sides had agreed to two minutes of opening remarks each. Secretary of State Antony Blinken kept his short and hospitable, though he did say the U.S. has “deep concerns with actions by China, including in Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Taiwan, cyber attacks on the United States, and economic coercion toward our allies. Each of these actions threaten the rules-based order that maintains global stability.”
China’s director of the Central Commission for Foreign Affairs, Yang Jiechi, then went on a 20-minute tear (including translation) about the superiority of “Chinese-style democracy” and America’s sins. The latter included a reference to Black Lives Matter, human-rights problems, and that the U.S. “has exercised long-arm jurisdiction and suppression and overstretched the national security through the use of force or financial hegemony.”
Mr. Yang added: “So we believe that it is important for the United States to change its own image and to stop advancing its own democracy in the rest of the world. Many people within the United States actually have little confidence in the democracy of the United States.” As we’ve noted, the Chinese like to echo the woke U.S. media critique of America. --->READ MORE HERE
The Biden administration held its first face-to-face meeting with the Chinese regime last week. The American side was represented by Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s national security adviser. Their counterparts were Chinese Director of the Office of the Central Commission for Foreign Affairs Yang Jiechi and Foreign Minister Wang Yi. While most of the discussions in Anchorage, Alaska were held behind closed doors, the public open session set the table with an exchange of insults that resembled an ugly food fight.
Blinken and Sullivan tried to put on a show of tough talk concerning a range of issues dividing the United States and China. They pointed to China’s abysmal human rights record, especially against the ethnic minority of Uyghurs in China’s western Xinjiang province, and China’s suppression of freedoms in Hong Kong. They accused China of engaging in cyberattacks and using coercive actions in the military and economic spheres. “Each of these actions threaten the rules-based order that maintains global stability,” Blinken declared to the Chinese delegation sitting across from him. “That's why they're not merely internal matters and why we feel an obligation to raise these issues here today.”
What Blinken and Sullivan failed to mention in their opening remarks is more striking than what they said. They ignored the giant elephant in the room – the coronavirus that originated in China and the Chinese regime’s coverup of the truth about the virus’s human contagion until it was too late. Blinken and Sullivan lost a valuable opportunity to ask their high-level Chinese counterparts why, if China’s government has nothing to hide, it did not provide the World Health Organization’s investigatory team that recently visited China unfettered access to China’s laboratory facilities and personnel. Why all the stonewalling?
China’s officials sternly replied to the public statements by Blinken and Sullivan and the tone in which the statements were delivered. Director Yang Jiechi and Foreign Minister Wang Yi essentially told their U.S. counterparts that the United States does not speak for the world and should clean up its own messes before presuming to lecture the Chinese or butting into China’s internal affairs. The strategy was to turn the tables on the United States and put the Biden administration’s senior representatives on the defensive. --->READ MORE HEREFollow links below to related stories:
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