The White House believes that it can deter Beijing from invading Taiwan, punish the Chinese Communist Party for its genocidal campaign against the Uyghurs and the Hong Kong crackdown, and react to other misbehavior, all while simultaneously seeking bilateral cooperation on climate change. And it believes, as top Biden administration officials fanned out to achieve this latter diplomatic feat, that it can do so without ceding ground on the other issues.
The problem is simple, as Miles Yu, a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution described it to me in an interview last week. “The world is begging China to cooperate,” he said. “China uses this kind of plea not as an opportunity to solve the problem, but as an opportunity to bargain with, to blackmail the international community.” In other words, unlike the American officials calling the state of the climate a crisis, Beijing will play along, but only to leverage its most valuable bargaining chip: the planet.
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