Win-win cooperation and red lines.
Those will be China’s top line messages in Anchorage, Alaska, next Thursday, when its foreign policy chief Yang Jiechi and foreign minister Wang Yi will meet Secretary of State Antony Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan. Why this meeting?
Beijing has been disappointed by the Biden administration’s relative sustaining of the Trump administration’s China strategy. Yang, the architect of Xi Jinping’s American strategy, had believed that the Biden administration would return to a version of the Obama administration’s policy — that is to say, a U.S. policy of welcoming increased Chinese investment in return for Washington’s appeasement on most other issues. Instead, the U.S. Navy has maintained its presence in the South China Sea. Biden has retained tariffs and restrictions on Chinese exports and the country’s technology companies/intelligence outfits. U.S. officials have also continued to condemn Beijing’s human rights abuses in Hong Kong and against the Uyghurs in Xinjiang province.
Beijing did not anticipate this, hence the Chinese Communist Party’s desperation for this meeting. A meeting, it must be noted, for which the Biden administration has very wisely made Beijing wait. While the Chinese are spinning Alaska as halfway between Washington and Beijing and thus no signal of deference, no one should miss the fact that Alaska is U.S. territory. Nor is it coincidental that Blinken and Sullivan will meet their counterparts only on a return journey from meeting allies in South Korea and Japan.
That takes us back to Yang. As with his failed June 2020 Hawaii overtures to then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Yang’s Alaska objective will be to get Biden back into a more China-comfortable policy posture.
To that end, “win-win cooperation” is Beijing’s banner for asserting that both nations benefit most by diplomatic and economic cooperation. We should, for example, expect Yang to make offers to push Iran to return to compliance with the 2015 JCPOA nuclear accord and pressure North Korea to make nuclear weapons concessions. Yang will also very likely pledge more ambitious carbon emission cuts. Beijing is aware that these are top Biden administration priorities in which Chinese cooperation would be helpful.
That said, Yang’s pledges will not be credible. Take the often-absurd feting of China’s carbon emissions pledges, for example. These pledges are just slightly undermined by the hundreds of new, dirty coal plants that Xi constructs each year. This underlines the reality of “win-win cooperation.” Leveraging its expanded U.S. investments and goods imports, China has won big. Xi has secured extraordinary influence over major U.S. corporations. Xi annually steals tens of billions of dollars in U.S. intellectual property, then has the gall to claim that the United States has a moral responsibility to share its innovations freely. Xi claims to respect international norms but engages in imperialism of a kind that hearkens back to 1930s Japan. Xi pretends to seek trusting friendship, but he deploys legions of intelligence officers and agents globally to steal, cajole, and intimidate.
On that note, expect Yang and Wang to bring inflated security details to Alaska. This won’t be for reasons of security, which the U.S. Diplomatic Security Service can ably handle, but rather to provide a cover with which to get PLA and MSS intelligence officers proximate to the U.S. delegations. Until the Trump administration, these activities were largely uncontested by the U.S. government. Still, things could be worse: The European Union is today almost a Chinese feudal subject.
Alongside his rose-tinted lies, Yang will also bring a harsher tone.
He’ll emphasize that all the false goodies on offer are subject to Washington’s respect for Beijing’s “red line” issues: namely, Washington’s closing of its eyes to China’s repression in Hong Kong, its genocide against the Uyghurs, and Washington’s decreased support for Taiwan. Yang will play hardball here, warning that if the Biden administration keeps up its pressure, it will feel varied consequences. China will warn of war over Taiwan (a threat that is credible) and pledge retaliation in other areas. These might include restrictions on rare earth exports and the undermining of U.S. interests on concerns such as Middle Eastern stability and the militarization of space. Yang will be banking, here, on the Biden administration’s fear of an escalation curve that ends with conflict.
One thing is for certain. Whatever Yang says at next week’s mini-summit, Yang’s objectives will reflect Xi’s interests — and thus will be fundamentally deleterious to U.S. interests. Hopefully, Blinken and Sullivan are aware of as much.
