A fractious encounter between a senior aide to President Joe Biden and the top Chinese diplomat could be headed for an encore, as U.S. and Chinese officials have agreed to a neutral-ground meeting in Switzerland this week.
White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan will meet Chinese Communist Party Politburo member Yang Jiechi in Zurich on the first stop of a three-city tour that includes meetings with NATO and European Union officials in Brussels. Their conversation coincides with an unusual show of force by Chinese warplanes around Taiwan, a democracy that relies on the United States for defense support in defiance of Beijing’s claim to sovereignty over the island, as Biden’s team attempts to rally democratic nations to counter threats from China without stumbling into a crisis.
“We will continue to seek to responsibly manage the competition between the U.S. and the PRC,” White House deputy press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters Tuesday. “That’s what this meeting is about.”
Yang and Sullivan previously met in Alaska alongside Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi. The gathering turned into a diplomatic melee, as Yang uncorked an 18-minute attack on American politics and foreign policy that included a demand for “the United States to change its own image and to stop advancing its own democracy in the rest of the world.”
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Chinese officials were fuming at the way Biden’s team scheduled trips to South Korea and Japan immediately prior to the Alaska dialogue — a piece of diplomatic choreography designed to allow the U.S. side to approach the meeting “from a position of strength,” as Blinken had said in prior weeks. “So let me say here that, in front of the Chinese side, the United States does not have the qualification to say that it wants to speak to China from a position of strength,” Yang said at the time.
Sullivan immediately panned the Chinese official’s “long, winding statements,” while his team and Blinken continue to hope that democratic nations can coordinate to mitigate threats from Beijing. Sullivan will end his week of travel in France on the heels of Blinken’s attendance at the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s foreign minister’s meeting in Paris.
“The principles at the heart of this organization and our democracies are being challenged by authoritarian governments that argue that their model is better at meeting people’s basic needs,” Blinken told the OECD ministerial. “Some of these same governments are actively seeking to undermine the rules-based order that’s been fundamental to security and prosperity for our countries for generations.”
Blinken did not mention China by name, but he touted an infrastructure initiative known as the Blue Dot Network that the Trump administration launched in 2019 to undercut China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which many U.S. and Western officials regard as a “predatory” investment scheme designed to give Beijing access to strategic chokepoints around the world.
“At a time when others are driving an approach to infrastructure projects and developing economies in which overseas companies import their own labor, extract resources, fail to consult with communities, end up driving countries into debt, we’re here today because we’re championing a different approach,” he said at another event on the sidelines of the OECD ministerial.
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Blinken attended the OECD meeting just days after hosting EU officials in Pittsburgh for the launch of the Trade and Technology Council, which China hawks hope will allow U.S. and European allies to develop “a common market for tech” — one free of vulnerability to Chinese espionage or control.
“While in Brussels, Mr. Sullivan will also meet with European Commission and European Council officials,” the White House announced Tuesday. “He will be joined by Deputy National Security Advisor Daleep Singh for additional European Union meetings on trade, technology, and global economic issues.”
