A top Republican senator has placed a hold on the nomination of Nicholas Burns, President Joe Biden’s pick to be the U.S. ambassador to China, over what he called the diplomat’s “failure to understand” the threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party.
Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, ranking member on the Senate Intelligence Committee, hit the pause button on the confirmation process for Burns this week following Burns’s October appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and one day after Biden’s three-hour discussion with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Burns, an ambassador during the Clinton administration and a State Department official during George W. Bush’s presidency, is thought to have wide support in the Senate, but Rubio said the Biden nominee is not the right man for the job.
“Nicholas Burns has a long career in public service, but it is a career defined by the failure to understand the threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party,” Rubio said. “In fact, Burns displayed no remorse or concern about his current business relationships with nationless corporations operating in China.”
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That is likely a reference to Burns working as a senior counselor at the Cohen Group for more than a decade. The global consulting firm has two offices in China, while its website touts its “solid record of success” in the Chinese market.
Rubio added, “Burns is exactly the type of nominee I expect from President Biden given this administration’s weak approach toward China, including lobbying against my bipartisan Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. The last thing we need is another caretaker of American decline in the room with the Chinese Communist Party.”
A regular theme of the preferred approach to China pushed by Burns is the need for the United States to challenge, compete with, and cooperate with the Chinese Communist Party.
“We will compete — and compete vigorously — with the PRC where we should, including on jobs and the economy, critical infrastructure, and emerging technologies. As President Biden has said, when the United States competes on a level playing field, there’s no country on Earth that can match us,” Burns said in his opening statement before the Senate last month. “We will cooperate with the PRC where it is in our interest, including on climate change, counternarcotics, global health, and nonproliferation. The world cannot solve the climate crisis unless the PRC does more to reduce their emissions.”
Burns added, “Finally, and crucially, we will challenge the PRC where we must, including when Beijing takes actions that run counter to America’s values and interests; threaten the security of the United States or our allies and partners; or undermine the rules-based international order. The PRC seeks to become the most powerful military, economic, and political actor in the Indo-Pacific.”
Burns echoed this theme when introducing Cui Tiankai, China’s ambassador to the U.S., noting the two diplomats “have been part of this relationship from a government perspective for many, many decades.”
The U.S. diplomat also lamented that “U.S.-China relations may be at their lowest point since before President Nixon’s opening to China in 1971, 1972” and “it seems to me that we’re turning away from the cooperation, the large-scale cooperation of the last 40 years, decidedly towards competition, in the military sense, over economic issues, on 5G.” He posed a question: “As we compete with each other — and we’re certainly competing — can we find a way to cooperate on climate change, on the pandemic, and other big global issues?”
Burns found himself in hot water in October when Sen. Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican, highlighted comments the Harvard professor made in March 2020 in which Burns lamented, “President Trump personally calls this the ‘Chinese virus’ or the ‘Wuhan virus.’ We all know that’s wrong. We all know it’s racist. We all know it’s not true.”
Burns wrote an op-ed for Foreign Affairs on March 25, 2020, in which he criticized both the Trump administration and the Chinese government for a “blame game” over “who is ultimately responsible” for the COVID-19 pandemic.
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The former ambassador claimed in June 2020 that the U.S. was accusing China of false things, arguing “They’ve accused each other of the most outrageous things, both incorrectly.”
