Why Chinese diplomats threw a tantrum in Anchorage.
Why Chinese diplomats threw a tantrum in Anchorage.
W hen the Chinese Communist Party’s top diplomats met Secretary of State Antony Blinken and national-security adviser Jake Sullivan last night for talks in Anchorage, Alaska, they put on a dishonest tantrum.
During an unscripted squabble, Yang Jiechi, the CCP’s top foreign-affairs official, requested that media remain in the room to cover a second set of remarks by him and Wang Yi, the foreign minister, after Blinken and Sullivan had spoken a second time to rebut a 17-minute-long speech by Yang that far exceeded the agreed-upon two-minute time limit.
“I think we thought too well of the United States. The United States isn’t qualified to speak to China from a position of strength,” Yang said in off-the-cuff remarks that didn’t make it onto the State Department’s official transcript.
It is, in one sense, perplexing that the Chinese regime sought the meeting at all. From the outset, Biden-administration officials have signaled that they would maintain most aspects of the Trump administration’s hawkish China policies, and, despite the administration’s concerning talk of trying to cooperate with Beijing on climate change, so far they’ve mostly kept and built on the Trump-era strategy. In fact, just a day ahead of the Anchorage talks, the U.S. imposed sanctions on 24 Chinese officials for their roles in the CCP’s ongoing crackdown on Hong Kong. The sanctions were a sore point for Wang, who complained at the summit that “this is not supposed to be the way one should welcome his guests.”
The Chinese delegation, however, long ago forfeited any claim to a warm welcome. The whole point of its participation in the discussions, as Yang’s comments suggested, was to gaslight the world about Beijing’s rise and its authoritarian model — which Yang attempted to pass off as “the Chinese style of democracy.”
These comments and others derailed the conversation between the two sides. “The Chinese delegation . . . seems to have arrived intent on grandstanding, focused on public theatrics and dramatics over substance,” a senior Biden-administration official said in a statement in reference to the deteriorating talks.
A number of China watchers attributed Yang’s tough talk to the confidence of the CCP in its growing power. As Elbridge Colby, a former top Trump-administration Pentagon official, put it on Twitter, “They *know* they’re very strong. Rhetoric from U.S. is cheap.” Colby then cited a recent analysis by Thomas Shugart, a scholar at the Center for a New American Security, that warned that U.S. deterrence in Asia could fail in the near future, given ongoing military trends and China’s geographic advantage and national will to prevent the U.S. from projecting power in the region. Although this may well be the case, the melee in Anchorage also revealed the CCP’s recognition of and frustration with the new bipartisan consensus in Washington around countering China’s malign behavior.
The sessions that followed yesterday’s histrionics, which revolved around Yang’s Orwellian denunciations of American democracy and of Washington’s claim to global leadership, were reportedly substantive. When the talks wrapped up this afternoon, Blinken said that although the U.S. “got a defensive response” for raising Beijing’s human-rights abuses, threats to Taiwan, and cyberattacks, the two sides engaged in “candid conversation” about everything from global hotspots such as North Korea and Iran to climate change.
Nevertheless, these top CCP officials did not come to Anchorage with any intent of offering concessions on Xinjiang, Taiwan, intellectual-property theft, or other central issues. As recently as February 1, when he addressed the National Committee on U.S.–China Relations, Yang blamed the United States for the downturn in bilateral ties and demanded that Biden reverse the previous administration’s policies. As Yang suggested last month and confirmed yesterday, the Party’s early outreach to the Biden administration is not about good-faith diplomatic engagement. The purpose of the event for Beijing seems to have been to push arguments for its own authoritarian model and to trash the very concept of a U.S.-led liberal democratic order as a racist, belligerent system — while hoping that Washington stands idly by as it does so. Coming from the world’s leading proponent of genocide, international bullying, and the kind of “might makes right” politics that Blinken aptly denounced in Alaska, Yang’s lecture was rich.
But the outbursts likely also signaled Beijing’s frustration that the days of a more dovish U.S. approach to China are gone and not coming back anytime soon. “China had this illusion that the Biden administration would completely abandon the Trump administration’s China policy,” said Miles Yu, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a former adviser on China to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. “They didn’t see that in a major way, and that’s why they blew up [in Alaska]. It’s an act of desperation.”
The Biden administration almost certainly knew that the Chinese delegation would approach Anchorage with the goal of making a scene. Senior U.S. officials have asserted that one of the purposes of the talks for Washington was to ensure that Beijing understood that the Biden administration’s public comments aligned with its genuine perspective, and that it would not be backing down without significant Chinese concessions on key issues. Only time will tell if conveying this message was worth lending the CCP so large a megaphone to evangelize for the twisted worldview according to which a vicious Leninist party-state is essential to the future of global democracy, peace, and development.