China’s new ambassador to the U.S., who arrived this week, has received a warm welcome from senior U.S. government officials. Human-rights advocates condemned the enthusiasm with which he was received. The new envoy will preside over an embassy deeply involved in espionage and stalking plots that have been made public in ongoing federal prosecutions.
Xie Feng, after landing in New York on Tuesday, said during a press conference that Beijing hopes that the U.S. “will work together with China to increase dialogue, to manage differences and also to expand our cooperation so that our relationship will be back to the right track.”
Last November, President Biden and General Secretary Xi pledged to further diplomatic engagement during a summit in Bali, but following the incident of the spy balloon, which the Chinese military flew over the middle of the U.S., Beijing pulled back from that planned engagement. In recent weeks, however, the Biden administration’s drive to secure meetings with senior Chinese officials, who have demanded policy concessions in return for dialogue, has advanced. The State Department has delayed certain policies that would counter the Chinese Communist Party, including new sanctions on CCP officials implicated in mass atrocities against Uyghurs and tighter restrictions on Huawei, Reuters reported.
At the G-7 Summit last weekend, Biden said that a “thaw” in the U.S.–China relationship was imminent, and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo held talks with her Chinese counterpart, Wang Wentao, yesterday in Washington, with the two officials discussing the two countries’ disputes over controls on technology exports and a range of other issues.
Photos published yesterday further support the idea that diplomatic discussions between the two countries are ramping up. At the State Department, Xie presented his credentials to protocol chief Rufus Gifford and met with undersecretary of state for policy Victoria Nuland. Photos published from the meetings show Xie shaking hands with Gifford and Nuland, each of the officials smiling.
Xie shared the photos on Twitter and wrote, “I look forward to working with American colleagues in the days ahead.”
Presented a copy of my credentials to Ambassador Gifford @US_Protocol, and had pleasure to meet with Under Secretary Nuland @UnderSecStateP. I look forward to working with American colleagues in the days ahead. pic.twitter.com/lLHTWO1p4c
— Xie Feng 谢锋 (@AmbXieFeng) May 26, 2023
U.S. officials told news outlets that they believe that Xie is someone they can work with.
“He’s a professional, he’s very capable. We’ve known him for many, many years,” a State department official told CNN earlier this week. “I think he’s been working at the [Ministry of Foreign Affairs] for more than 30 years, and we really known him from his time in Washington. He served multiple tours here, and most recently has been the vice foreign minister overseeing the Americas and other departments as well.”
Human-rights advocates are less optimistic about Xie’s arrival than the State Department is. “This man is not a mere ‘Ambassador’ but a key player in assaults on democracy and human rights abuses. So while dialogue may be necessary, grinning in a photo like this is NOT,” wrote Julie Millsap, the government relations director for the Uyghur Human Rights Project, in a post to Twitter.
Xie will preside over a Chinese diplomatic presence in America heavily implicated in plots that are the focus of several ongoing criminal cases playing out in federal court.
Federal prosecutors in Boston recently brought a case against a man whom they accused of setting up a CCP front group, the New England Alliance for the Peaceful Unification of China, at the behest of officials from China’s consulate-general in New York City and the party’s United Front Work Department. The defendant, Litang Liang, is also alleged to have surveilled, harassed, and reported the activities of protesters to Chinese officials, and court documents state that Liang was in touch with an official “who at the time was one of the highest-ranking PRC diplomats in the United States.”
Senior Chinese consular officials also visited the Chinese-government-run police station that had operated in New York City throughout 2022, another federal criminal complaint and open source videos show. And Chinese consulates in New York and Los Angeles reportedly organized paid protesters to demonstrate against Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen’s visit to the U.S. earlier this year.
Xie’s predecessor, Qin Gang, a Xi confidant who returned to China and was promoted to foreign minister, took an aggressive approach to the job. A month after his arrival in the country, he told a group of U.S. business, government, and academic figures that Washington should “please shut up,” and his subordinates yelled at congressional staff on at least two separate occasions.