John Kerry on Mass Atrocities: ‘That’s Not My Lane’

W hen Xie Zhenhua, China’s top climate negotiator, took to the podium Wednesday at the U.N. Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow to announce a U.S.–China declaration on methane emissions and other issues, he revealed that his team had met their American counterparts some 30 times, including twice in China, in Tianjin.

So a reporter asked America’s lead negotiator, John Kerry, how and whether, during his team’s nearly three dozen encounters with China’s team, they addressed Beijing’s use of forced labor and other human-rights issues in Xinjiang. The former secretary of state’s answer was unsurprising to anyone who’s listened to him in recent months — but nevertheless should be jarring: “We’re honest about the differences, and we certainly know what they are, and we’ve articulated them. But that’s not my lane here.”

The “differences” in this case concern Beijing’s campaign to destroy Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities under its jurisdiction — raising the question whether Kerry, as a U.S. government official working on an issue relevant to the Uyghur forced-labor issue, has a responsibility to advocate policies to bring an end to the crisis in Xinjiang.

His most recent statement and other remarks like it — such as when he told Bloomberg in September that “life is always full of tough choices . . . but first and foremost this planet must be protected” — would seem to contradict his pledges upon taking charge of the portfolio in January. Then, just days after Secretary of State Antony Blinken told the Senate that he stands behind the Trump administration’s decision to call Beijing’s atrocities in Xinjiang “genocide,” Kerry pledged that the U.S. stance on non-climate issues “will never be traded for anything that has to do with climate.”

That stance has been tested as Chinese diplomats and state-media outlets repeatedly declared that reaching an agreement with the U.S. on climate issues would require concessions in other areas. And in fact the Biden administration has been eager to prove that it can simultaneously compete and cooperate with Beijing.

After Biden officials took an initially tough approach to dealing with their counterparts, as it did at the Anchorage summit last March, Chinese officials stonewalled most of the White House’s attempts to hold bilateral discussions. To break through that wall, senior administration officials told reporters, President Biden sought a call with Xi Jinping in September. As a result of that call and a subsequent meeting between national-security adviser Jake Sullivan and Yang Jiechi, the Chinese Communist Party’s top diplomat, the two leaders will hold a virtual meeting next week. It’s no coincidence that Chinese officials from Xi on down to the party’s envoy in Washington, Qin Gang, have become more conciliatory, as was evident at the gala held this week by the National Committee on United States–China Relations, a nonprofit that “encourages understanding” between “citizens of both countries.”

As Kerry and Xie hammered out their climate declaration to the backdrop of that activity, Washington made one major concession. U.S. officials haven’t abandoned their staunch support of Taiwan amid recent Chinese saber-rattling, nor have they reversed a suite of actions taken over the past several months to build out a comprehensive response to Beijing’s ambitions. But Kerry’s team has, according to multiple accounts, attempted to block legislation that would bar imports from Xinjiang as the products of forced labor. Having passed the Senate, the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act now languishes in the House. That Biden himself won’t lend his support for the legislation suggests one of two things: that Kerry has a mandate to pursue this China approach as he sees fit, or that other officials who care more about human rights are powerless to stop him.

Kerry’s notion that putting in a word for Beijing’s victims is not his job comes through in his diplomacy. His office is housed at the State Department, but the former secretary of state doesn’t act like other top department officials, including Blinken, who make a point of huddling with America’s closest allies before meeting their Chinese counterparts and then begin those contentious meetings by raising Beijing’s many human-rights transgressions. There’s no indication that Kerry has ever meaningfully discussed human-rights issues in his own meetings with Chinese officials, except to internalize their talking points, as he did when he complained that forced-labor sanctions made it difficult for the Chinese to meet emissions-reductions targets.

To this day, it’s not even clear if he agrees with his colleagues within the Biden administration that Beijing is guilty of genocide. He’s never said so publicly, and when I asked about it several weeks ago, a spokesperson for his office wouldn’t give me an answer on the record or point to an instance in which Kerry endorsed State’s genocide determination.

Although the party hasn’t gotten Washington to back down on the core of the Biden administration’s strategy, it seems content to have achieved one very important victory: proof of concept for the notion that U.S. officials are willing to pull back on certain elements of their overarching China strategy in order to prop up the cooperative element of Biden’s approach.

With the new U.S.–China agreement advanced yesterday, they might continue to do that. The agreement contains little in the way of new concrete targets on climate-policy issues, but it does establish a “Working Group on Climate Action in the 2020s, which will meet regularly to address the climate crisis and advance the multilateral process.” This will include, according to the agreement, exchanges not just at the governmental level but also among academics, think tanks, businesses, and more.

As the American Foreign Policy Council’s Michael Sobolik put it to me: “The danger is the working group becoming an end unto itself, like the U.S.–China Strategic and Economic Dialogue was.” He was referring to the format that the previous administration killed off in 2018 and that the foreign-policy set in Washington now widely acknowledges had impeded us from seeing Beijing’s intent for what it was — and acting on it.

To Kerry, that’s acceptable as long as the two countries are working together to avert global catastrophe. “This is a climate crisis. It’s perhaps one of the most compelling issues we face as a planet, if not the most,” he said yesterday. He’s failed, however, to advance a compelling argument that “climate cooperation” with China will actually accomplish much, given that Beijing is certainly more likely to act according to its own interests and on its own timelines. The most concrete aspect of the joint declaration is this working group, not the old emissions-reductions pledges it recapitulates.

Most important, it’s possible to think of another set of just as compelling and more immediate crises — human-rights violations, especially, but also Beijing’s threats to Taiwan — caused by the very party-state entity that the climate envoy views as a reasonable and amenable negotiating partner.