‘The Shortest Détente Ever’

Starting last fall, Washington had been overtaken by the sense that Beijing was making a genuine attempt to patch things up with the Biden administration. This followed an eventful monthslong stretch in which Chinese Communist Party mouthpieces threatened to shoot down then–House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s plane en route to Taiwan, Xi Jinping completed his ascension to new heights of uncontested power, and Beijing suspended its cooperation with the administration on a series of diplomatic initiatives. A swift rhetorical reversal followed, as the government of China grappled with internal crises — protests against its brutal zero-Covid regime and the outbreaks that followed the lifting of that policy.

Belief in the prospects of détente seems to have diminished significantly starting yesterday, when the Pentagon revealed that a likely Chinese surveillance balloon had flown into the U.S. via Alaska, and spent some substantial amount of time over an Air Force base that hosts over 100 U.S. nuclear missiles. China’s foreign ministry claims that the balloon is a civilian meteorological device that drifted away and expressed its regret over the matter.

Now, Secretary of State Antony Blinken is postponing — but apparently not cancelling — a trip to China, which was scheduled for next week. That visit was supposed to follow the in-person summit between President Biden and Xi that took place in Bali last November, after which the Chinese side said that it would resume diplomatic talks on climate and other issues that it had suspended over the Pelosi episode.

I think Josh Rogin put it best today on Twitter:

There’s certainly ample reason to believe that this purported détente was not all it was cracked up to be in the first place.

This narrative, about a purported diplomatic softening, initially gained traction in Washington owing to the efforts of China’s former ambassador to the U.S., Qin Gang. Qin is a suave, English-speaking diplomat who arrived in the U.S. in summer 2021. He then proceeded to make the rounds at high-profile Washington confabs, eventually charming and courting the D.C. press corps with a vengeance.

The thing to know about Qin is that however smoothly he delivers the message, he’s a Xi loyalist and a hardliner. Some observers credit him with debuting the Wolf Warrior–style diplomacy that gained prominence in 2020, during an earlier stint as a foreign-ministry spokesperson.

At the end of August 2021, Qin spoke to the Beijing-friendly National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, and, responding to a question about how the U.S. and China could mend fences, said that if the Biden administration disagrees with Chinese stances, it should “please shut up.” That shocked meeting participants, I reported at the time.

Qin, however, spent the following several months making friends across the U.S.

In several visits to schools, he emphasized the importance of people-to-people exchanges:

He visited an electric-vehicle-production factory in California:

And he even met up with Elon Musk for a Tesla ride:

But his most important and, pound-for-pound, effective initiative was his campaign to woo Washington-based journalists. This began with a press briefing he delivered at an event hosted by the Bloomberg New Economy Forum in December 2021, which seemed to have been attended by several journalists. Apparently, it wasn’t a successful initiative. The Party’s Global Times publication subsequently blasted journalists for declining to report on Qin’s remarks, which were a largely unremarkable defense of Beijing’s position on a number of issues:

Some netizens said the weird silence from the US media on reporting the Chinese ambassador’s views on China-US relations – which were considered to be “real, rational and reasonable” – reflects deep misunderstandings from the US toward China-related topics, mirroring its hypocrisy in advocating “press freedom.” Some others pay sympathy toward American public for living in lies crafted by the media. . . .

However, essentially no mainstream US media outlets covered the joint interview that gives a broad picture of China-US ties, six days after the event was held. It remains unknown whether these media outlet will cover the story later at all.

But the Chinese embassy in Washington persevered throughout 2022. With the help of U.S. friends in Washington, it continued to invite journalists to joint interviews with Qin and put him onstage at major events, such as a conference hosted by Forbes. Throughout this, he pushed Party talking points denying the Chinese regime’s mass atrocities and backing its hardline claims on Taiwan. This didn’t always go unnoticed. Rogin, for instance, attended one of these sessions last August — and torched Qin for his repeated falsehoods during the meeting. Other times, China’s envoy pushed similar falsehoods, unchallenged:

All throughout this, apparently, Qin had been granted minimal access to Biden administration officials who didn’t see it worth engaging the envoy in any serious way. In October, reports emerged that Xi would promote Qin to foreign minister, after only a bit over a year in Washington — a meteoric rise. And a sort of consensus view emerged, best expressed by a Semafor report that broke the news of Qin’s appointment:

Though he himself rejects the label, Qin is seen by many as one of China’s “wolf warrior” diplomats who’ve taken a more aggressive stance on the global stage, in some cases openly berating and mocking foreign powers, both in meetings and on social media. Their hawkish rhetoric has intensified in tandem with China’s willingness to flex its military muscle, including by running extensive armed forces exercises and launching missiles close to Taiwan. . . .

However, Qin’s brand of diplomacy is also considered more nimble and subtle compared to his wolf warrior peers within the diplomatic pack, and he has expressed openness to working alongside the U.S. on key issues such as climate. (His National Interest op-ed stressed that “China-U.S. relations should not be a zero-sum game”). Amid the tensions of Speaker Pelosi’s Taiwan visit, Qin kept open the lines of communication with the White House.

The idea wasn’t that China’s new foreign minister is some sort of reformer; it’s that Beijing is newly serious about engaging the Biden administration and that it’s willing to tone down its rhetoric to meaningfully do so. That’s the environment in which the Biden–Xi meeting took place last fall. And it’s why Blinken had planned to travel to China next week, to further the diplomatic initiatives that the two leaders discussed. The foundation of this diplomatic outreach, however, was a pretty façade on the Party’s constantly escalating aggression toward Taiwan, and its continued malign-influence activities on U.S. soil. In fact, as recently as this fall, members of Qin’s team at the embassy cornered and berated a congressional staffer for that staffer’s boss’s support of Taiwan.

This week’s news strongly suggests that as the Party is willing to moderate its tone and refrain from the sort of outbursts that characterized the first meeting, in March 2021, between Biden officials and their Chinese counterparts, the underlying policy has not changed. And Chinese officials are willing to launch a surveillance device over sensitive U.S. military installations — and follow that up with barely credible claims exculpating that behavior. The postponement of Blinken’s trip is an initial reaction to that. The circumstances surrounding the trip, when it eventually happens, will provide a more complete picture of how the administration actually views the prospects for this détente.