Chinese authorities declined to publish an opinion column submitted by United States Ambassador Terry Branstad, drawing a derisive response from U.S. officials.
“Their refusal to do so shows just how much China’s unelected Party elites fear their own people’s free-thinking and the free world’s judgment about their governance practices inside China,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a statement after China’s state-run paper rebuffed the op-ed.
China’s People’s Daily rejected the column on the grounds that it was “full of loopholes and seriously inconsistent with facts.” A senior Chinese diplomat objected to the tone more broadly, protesting that it was “designed to find fault” with Beijing.
“Would you agree to publish a fact-twisting and defamatory article about your country without any revision?” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian asked reporters.
Branstad’s column offered a survey of the fraught U.S.-China relationship that laid the blame for worsening tensions on the Chinese Communist Party regime’s refusal “to create a genuine level playing field” for Americans.
“The root cause of the current tensions in the relationship is China’s longstanding strategy of only selectively ‘coupling’ with the United States and systematically controlling the access of Americans to Chinese society,” he wrote in the op-ed, which was released by the U.S. State Department.
The dispute comes just a few months after the European Union admitted that it had allowed Chinese authorities to censor an op-ed written by the EU’s envoy to China, Nicolas Chapuis, and co-signed by the ambassadors from each of the EU’s member states. The line that the People’s Daily censors excised referred to “the outbreak of the coronavirus in China, and its subsequent spread to the rest of the world over the past three months.”
The People’s Daily maintained that the argument of Branstad’s column fell short of its standards as “a prestigious, serious, and professional media for selecting and publishing articles.”
Zhao implied that the submission was a set play, designed to provoke a refusal and then to be used to embarrass Beijing.
Pompeo noted that Chinese Ambassador Cui Tiankai “has published five Op-eds this year in prominent U.S. news outlets.” Pompeo then dismissed the complaints of Chinese officials as juvenile actions.
“The People’s Daily’s response once again exposes the Chinese Communist Party’s fear of free speech and serious intellectual debate — as well as Beijing’s hypocrisy when it complains about lack of fair and reciprocal treatment in other countries,” he said. “If Communist China is sincere about becoming a mature power and strengthening relations with the free world, General Secretary Xi Jinping’s government would respect the right for Western diplomats to speak directly to the Chinese people, allow foreign journalists back into China, and stop the intimidation and harassment of investigative journalists, foreign and Chinese, who strive to uphold the integrity of the fifth estate to serve the public good.”
