Structurally incapable of admitting their own failures, Chinese Communist Party leaders insist and truly believe that the United States alone is responsible for the crisis in Sino-American relations.
Under the direction of the Chinese Communist Party’s foreign policy tsar, Yang Jiechi, Beijing says the way to fix things is simple: The U.S. simply needs to do what it did prior to 2017, which is, to say, broadly tolerate China’s imperialism, trade manipulation, endemic intellectual property theft, and various human rights abuses. China’s ambassador to the U.S., Qin Gang, again emphasized this argument at the Aspen Security Forum on Wednesday.
Interviewed by the Financial Times’s Edward Luce, Qin spoke softly but without much humility. To avoid a new cold war, Qin explained that the U.S. had to end the “democracy versus authoritarianism narrative, no geopolitical confrontation, no decoupling, no supply cuts, no arms race.”
Translated: Accept our human rights abuses and undermining of the democratic rule of law. Accept our seizure of the Western Pacific without complaint or contest. Accept our intellectual property theft from American innovators and businesses. Oh, and keep buying our goods without regard for our trade manipulation, forced technology transfers, and broader interest in undermining America and its very closest allies.
The silliness continued.
Questioned about China’s genocide against the Uyghur people, Qin explained there is “a lot of disinformation and lies around, you know, we are not happy with that.” Qin insisted this issue was not one of international concern but rather of China’s domestic need to conduct an effective “anti-terrorism” campaign. (Incidentally, China is so proud of this strategy that it has suggested Western nations replicate it.)
The ambassador adopted a similar narrative on Hong Kong and what he described as the most sensitive issue in U.S-China relations: Taiwan. He argued that these are matters of China’s domestic sovereignty, not legitimate areas of international concern. And for China, that is that.
Cleverly referencing this Chinese Communist obsession with respect for sovereignty, Luce asked how Beijing could sustain this argument in the context of its support of Russia over the war in Ukraine. After all, Russia’s onslaught against Ukraine is gutting the sovereign rights of the latter. Yet China offers no condemnation of Russia and maintains very close relations with Moscow. Caught in a hypocrisy trap, Qin resorted to verbosity. Apart from a few Chinese diplomats, apparently planted in the audience, no one else appeared convinced.
On that hypocrisy point, it’s worth noting Qin’s claim that the Chinese Communist Party’s governance model had lifted hundreds of millions of its citizens out of poverty. Of course, the opposite is true. It was actually China’s post-Mao access to global capitalist markets, as undergirded by the U.S.-led international order, that facilitated vast improvements in Chinese lives. This is the very thing that China’s regime now hopes to destroy.
Qin concluded with that most predictable of Chinese diplomatic lines: a call to return to “win-win cooperation.”
As Josh Rogin has noted, that’s the code for “China wins twice.”
