The World According to Liu Jianchao

There are no “moderates” in the top ranks of the Chinese Communist Party, and Liu Jianchao — the head of its International Department — is certainly not one. With Liu’s arrival in the U.S. yesterday, I reported on his track record as a hard-line official within the party’s top “anti-corruption” office, tasked with conducting diplomacy to pave the way for Beijing’s global kidnapping operations, including the now-notorious Operation Fox Hunt.

At the Council on Foreign Relations this morning, he apparently dazzled, enlightened, and entertained, with audience members laughing along with his answers on Xi Jinping’s promise to return pandas to the U.S. He was there on the heels of back-channel quasi-official diplomatic talks at the Asia Society on Monday, where he met with Blackstone’s Steve Schwarzman, John Thornton of Barrick Gold, Cornell University professor Jessica Chen Weiss, former State Department official Daniel Russel, and others.

With China’s economy facing headwinds, Beijing is evidently in retrenchment mode, pulling back from the Wolf Warrior–style diplomacy that isolated it from the world during the Covid pandemic. Xi’s visit to the U.S. seemed to mark a new chapter in Chinese diplomacy, with an emphasis on courting foreign investment, seeking the “stabilization” of ties with Washington, and playing down the core disagreements that mark the bilateral relationship. Liu downplayed the harsh rhetoric that characterized the Party’s diplomacy as recently as last year. This was too cute by half. “I don’t believe there has always been a Wolf Warrior diplomacy, and there’s no talk about coming back to that diplomacy,” he said.

Still, Liu, the first senior party official to come to America since Xi’s visit in November, succeeded in taking a measured tone this morning. He didn’t stray from his talking points on Taiwan. He called Taiwan a “red line” and said, “We take seriously the statements of the United States not supporting Taiwan independence.” Later, he declined to answer a question about Taiwan’s upcoming presidential election and how Beijing would respond to the election of DPP candidate William Lai, whom party officials view as one of their top enemies.

He claimed that China is open to business and that U.S. and international firms have nothing to fear, despite the raids that the authorities have carried out on foreign consultancies. In fact, he asserted, while U.S. firms in China have nothing to fear, it is America’s counterespionage laws and aggressive enforcement of national-security actions that have hampered business ties, making it more difficult to operate in the U.S. He used a similar technique later on, parrying an audience question about Beijing’s refusal to grant visas to more Western and international reporters with a complaint about Trump-era decisions that forced Chinese state media organs operating in America to register variously as foreign agents and foreign missions. (That is, after all, what they are.) “Now, that was wrong,” he said, adding that he hopes the two countries could resolve the issue.

Notably, Liu also defended China’s burgeoning alignment with Iran and Russia and its general orientation against Israel. He indicated that he believed Iranian officials’ claims to him, during his trip to the country last month, that Tehran did not assist in the October 7 attack and that officials did not know in advance. “So they did not really give any military support or even military advice to Hamas, so I think that they are being very, very prudent in this regard.” On his country’s “no-limits partnership” with Russia, he said: “I think that the relationship is useful for the two countries, and that’s useful for the region and the world.”

It was on Hong Kong where Liu sounded most like a wolf warrior. Ian Johnson, a CFR scholar, had carefully asked Liu if imprisoning Jimmy Lai was an objectively counterproductive move, in that it had harmed international business confidence in Hong Kong’s role as a global financial center. As gently as was probably possible in front of a U.S. audience, Liu delivered an unconditional defense of Beijing’s crackdown in the city: “We managed to put order in Hong Kong, and I think that is welcomed by the foreign businesspeople as well.” He didn’t use Lai’s name in his answer but spoke of how “anybody trying to sabotage the order” in Hong Kong would not be tolerated and would be dealt with according to the law.

But overall, Liu spoke in a way that made him come across as urbane and reasonable, rather than in a manner that reflected the hard-line stances that he defended. It’s clear that he is capable of deceiving people into viewing his stance as conciliatory — a skill that will serve him well for the remainder of his swing through the U.S., during which he will reportedly meet with Biden administration officials.