Wendy Sherman Out at State after Report Alleging She Delayed China Sanctions

Wendy Sherman, the U.S. deputy secretary of state, will retire from the State Department at the end of June, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement this morning. The announcement came the day after a bombshell Reuters report that revealed Sherman had blocked certain sanctions measures targeting the Chinese Communist Party.

“On behalf of the Department, I thank Wendy for her service,” Blinken said, in a lengthy statement recapitulating her various State Department roles over three presidential administrations. “I wish her and her family all the best in their next chapter.” Blinken also credited her with building out the administration’s approach to the Indo-Pacific, adding that “she has overseen our efforts to strengthen the Department’s capabilities to manage our relationship with the People’s Republic of China, and built greater convergence with allies and partners.”

Yesterday, Reuters published a report detailing Sherman’s role in delaying long-scheduled measures on the department’s “competitive actions” calendar — a list of policies designed to counter Beijing’s malign activities. In the wake of the Chinese spy-balloon incident in February, Sherman had reportedly ordered that certain actions be delayed, including tighter restrictions on Huawei and sanctions punishing officials from the CCP’s United Front Work Department for their role in the Uyghur genocide.

Soon after the balloon episode, Rick Waters, the department official who leads State’s in-house China policy cell, wrote in a February 6 email obtained by Reuters: “Guidance from S (Secretary of State) is to push non-balloon action to the right so we can focus on symmetric and calibrated response. We can revisit other actions in a few weeks.” Sources told the outlet that Sherman oversees the State Department’s approach to China and that Waters told staff in late March that Sherman said the department would move on from the balloon incident, as she wanted Blinken to reschedule a trip to Beijing that had been postponed.

Reuters also reported that Sherman’s directives had “damaged morale” within that cell, called China House.

The State Department responded to National Review‘s request for comment about the potential link between Sherman’s retirement and the Reuters story only by forwarding Blinken’s statement from this morning.

The perspective attributed to Sherman by the report appears to reflect the Biden administration’s broader approach to engaging China after the spy-balloon incident. “We’re seeking to move beyond that,” a senior administration official told reporters yesterday, after national-security adviser Jake Sullivan met top CCP diplomat Wang Yi for a hastily organized round of talks in Vienna. The conversations, which took place over eight hours split between Wednesday and Thursday, were “candid, substantive, and constructive,” the senior official said.

Chinese diplomats have repeatedly demanded U.S. policy concessions from the Biden administration in exchange for an audience with their top officials.

“The Chinese side noted that what the US should do is to establish a correct understanding of China, prevent strategic misjudgments, abandon the Cold War mentality, stop containment and suppression, stop engaging in zero-sum games, return to rationality and pragmatism, and meet China halfway to promote the stabilization of China-US relations,” the CCP’s Global Times propaganda outfit said in an English-language article about the meeting, attributing the comment to a “senior Chinese official.”

The White House, however, claims that it doesn’t accept Chinese demands for such concessions.

“We really push back anytime there’s preconditions before there’s diplomatic conversations. For us, managing competition responsibly, part of stabilizing relationships is having those conversations regardless of what’s going on, regardless of which actions are happening on either side,” the senior U.S. official said yesterday.