[On Wednesday, a six-hour meeting in Zurich between Yang and White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan ended with an announcement that President Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping would hold a virtual summit before the end of the year. China’s state broadcaster described the outcome as an agreement to get relations back on track.]
By Christian
Shepherd and Lyric
Li
Early meetings after President
Biden took office quickly dashed hopes of an immediate detente. China’s most
senior diplomat, Yang Jiechi, delivered a bombastic
speech about how the United States lacked “qualifications” to tell
China what to do. Later talks to “set guardrails” were more
cordial but ended without a clear sense of how the fraying
relationship would avoid unraveling further.
Yet a gradual accumulation of small
diplomatic breakthroughs in recent weeks has created hope among Chinese
scholars that the world’s two largest economies have placed a floor — albeit a
fragile one — under the fierce diplomatic spat. The success, or otherwise, of
attempts to shelve lasting disagreements will be tested in coming months as
both sides enter crucial climate talks and China fends off
calls for diplomatic boycotts of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing.
On Wednesday, a six-hour meeting in
Zurich between Yang and White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan
ended with an announcement that President Biden and Chinese President Xi
Jinping would hold
a virtual summit before the end of the year. China’s state
broadcaster described the outcome as an agreement to get relations
back on track.
[Chinese
jets menace Taiwan, pressuring U.S. support of island’s defenses]
Deng Yuwen, a former editor of the
Study Times, a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) journal, said the meeting was
significant because it reflected a consensus that the two sides needed to find
a way to improve ties. “It shows recognition that the relationship was stuck at
the bottom of a ravine; any deeper and it would become truly dangerous,” he
said.
In Beijing, the perceived
continuity from President Donald Trump to Biden in confronting China had
originally created a sense of fatalism among Chinese scholars, who had taken to
warning that U.S. politicians from both parties are intent on thwarting China’s
rise.
Chu Shulong, a scholar at Tsinghua
University in Beijing, said that a visit by Deputy Secretary of State Wendy
Sherman to Tianjin in July paved the way for productive talks between U.S.
climate envoy John F. Kerry and his Chinese counterpart, Xie Zhenhua. “The
public statements at the time were strongly worded, but I know that the talks
were positive for both sides,” he said.
After two visits to China by Kerry,
Xi announced last month that China would no longer build coal-fired power
plants beyond its borders, a breakthrough ahead of the U.N. climate
negotiations in November in Glasgow, Scotland.
But areas of aligned interests
remain limited. Simmering disagreements over any number of topics — including
China’s escalating
military aggression toward Taiwan and the origins of the coronavirus pandemic — could easily unwind diplomatic
niceties about a desire to avoid confrontation.
U.S. negotiations will also have to
contend with China’s increasingly combative public diplomacy, where any
criticism of China for the mass internment of Uyghurs and other mostly Muslim
people in Xinjiang, or the erosion of civil liberties in Hong Kong, is met with
angry displays of patriotic bravado.
In their July meeting, Chinese
Foreign Minister Wang Yi told Sherman
that to improve ties, the United States must not challenge or smear China’s
political system, disrupt its development or violate its national sovereignty.
He also presented her with
two lists, one of “U.S. wrongdoings that must stop” and another of “key
individual cases that China has concerns with.” Neither list was made public.
[China
is key to saving the planet from climate change. But it can’t quit coal.]
For Beijing, one important aspect
of Biden’s China policy that has helped improve relations is the end of attacks
on China’s political system that had become the norm under Trump, said Wu
Xinbo, a scholar at Fudan University in Shanghai.
“Biden still emphasizes that the
competition between the U.S. and China is one between democracy and autocracy.
There’s still an ideological component. But he doesn’t directly target the
Chinese Communist Party or Xi Jinping himself,” Wu said.
Biden’s criticisms of Chinese trade
practices or human rights abuses have steered clear of the inflammatory language used by Trump, who would
call the coronavirus the “Chinese virus.” Beijing took particular
dislike to then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, whose description of Chinese Communist Party rule as
“tyranny” was met with repeated attacks from Chinese state media and parting
sanctions as he left office.
Even so, Beijing has given no sign
that it is ready for an outright detente and has suggested that only when all
of its conditions are met will a reset in relations be possible.
When Huawei executive Meng
Wanzhou returned to China last month after the United States
ended a push to extradite her from Canada, Beijing released two Canadians from Chinese jail
and lifted an exit ban on U.S. citizens Victor
and Cynthia Liu. But the Chinese Foreign Ministry denied that the “removal of
this deep thorn” was enough to fix ties.
“There are still many thorns, both
big and small,” ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said during a briefing last
week. “We hope the U.S. can pay attention and take action to clear these two
lists.”
[Xi
Jinping’s crackdown on everything is remaking Chinese society]
Negotiations over specific demands
are likely to increase in the coming months as the White House concludes
reviews into its China policy. On Monday, U.S. trade envoy Katherine Tai laid out a plan to reengage with China over distortions
in its economy, while also highlighting that China was failing to meet its
commitments under an agreement signed last year.
He Weiwen, a former counselor at
Chinese consulates in San Francisco and New York, said in an interview that the
two sides would need to review the trade deal signed under Trump. He argues
that China’s low levels of purchases reflect obstacles preventing China from
meeting the proposed dollar value set at the time, including U.S. supply
restrictions and procurement deals not meeting requirements to be price
competitive.
“All the developments in bilateral
relations since 2017 have shown that Washington doesn’t tolerate China’s
values, its socialist system and CCP leadership,” which will make it very
difficult for the United States to meet China’s demands, said He, who is now a
senior fellow at the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin
University in Beijing.
Chu, the Tsinghua scholar, agrees
that an immediate significant improvement is impossible, but that any progress
is still pretty good. “For now, if things don’t get worse, then that is also
good news,” he said.
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