Despite calling the regime a threat to democracy and a perpetrator of mass atrocities, the administration might try to reset U.S.-China relations anyway.
Despite calling the Chinese regime a threat to democracy and a perpetrator of mass atrocities, the Biden administration might try to reset U.S.-China relations.
P resident Biden has pledged to pursue “extreme competition” with the Chinese Communist Party, but his administration’s diplomatic outreach to the regime suggests otherwise. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and national-security adviser Jake Sullivan will meet their Chinese counterparts, Yang Jiechi and Wang Yi, for high-level talks in Alaska later this month, the South China Morning Post reported yesterday and Bloomberg confirmed this morning.
This development hardly comes as a surprise, given Biden’s and Blinken’s repeated overtures for cooperation with Beijing. Both have stated multiple times that the U.S. should compete with China while still leaving room for cooperation on key issues. “Our relationship with China will be competitive when it should be, collaborative when it can be, and adversarial when it must be,” Blinken said earlier this month, during his first major address as secretary of state.
Although the Biden administration has taken a tough line on China’s political- and military-pressure campaign targeting Taiwan, and on its human-rights abuses in Xinjiang and Hong Kong, the cracks are starting to show.
Appearing before the House Foreign Affairs Committee this afternoon, Blinken called the talks “an important opportunity for us to lay out in very frank terms the many concerns that we have with Beijing’s actions.” In addition to raising U.S. concerns, “we’ll also explore whether there are avenues for cooperation,” he said, adding that future engagement will be conditioned on “tangible progress and tangible outcomes.”
To align U.S. policy toward the Chinese party-state with reality, though, would require administration officials to act as if they truly believed their assessments of the regime: that it is a genocidal entity seeking to subvert democracy on a global scale and co-opt the international order and the future of technological development to authoritarian ends.
Such a policy would not include talks that might well result in bilateral cooperation. Although Blinken downplayed the prospects of cooperation with China this afternoon, the administration is already planning to engage with Beijing in multilateral institutions. In addition to convening the Alaska meeting, the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that the two sides are expected to chair a G-20 working group on climate-change issues.
The president and other top officials have argued that the U.S. will have to engage Beijing on climate and global public health, given their supposedly shared interests on these issues. But that stance ignores the ways in which Beijing has proved itself to actively impede progress on these fronts by, to take only two examples, failing to meet its own pledges to slow greenhouse-gas emissions and spreading disinformation about the COVID pandemic.
Officials might also argue that the administration still intends to compete vigorously with the Chinese. After all, the Alaska trip will follow Blinken’s planned visits to Tokyo and Seoul, the implication being that the U.S. commitment to Asian democracies on Beijing’s doorstep — as well as the newly revived Quad grouping of the U.S., Japan, Australia, and India (which is scheduled to hold a virtual summit on Friday) — is rock solid.
But the strength of the Biden administration’s approach to China has come from maintaining the previous administration’s efforts: From building on the Quad and upgrading relations with Taiwan, to calling out Chinese Communist Party atrocities for what they are, the Trump team passed on to the current one a solid strategy on which to build. And the Biden administration evidently did choose to build on it. Until now.
The successful approach that crystallized in the final year of the Trump administration was about pushing Beijing without granting concessions. Matt Pottinger, the former deputy national-security adviser, explained yesterday: “We didn’t really see significant escalation over the course of 2020 by China against us, at a time we took something on the order of 200 different steps to counteract or impose costs on activities that China had been taking against us over the years.” Speaking during a panel hosted by the Alexander Hamilton Society (a student group to which, full disclosure, I belonged in college), Pottinger was describing the U.S.-China economic relationship, but the “peace through strength” approach that guided the last administration also played out in other spheres. “We had a flurry of activity,” he continued, “and yet the responses by China were generally fairly measured.”
Despite some commendable early steps, the Biden strategy is starting to look very different. Officials may not admit it, but engaging with top Chinese officials in this way, quite possibly to seek a reset, will only encourage the malign behavior that the administration hopes to deter.