White House national security adviser Sullivan.
White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said that the Chinese Communist Party official Yang Jiechi’s rhetoric at a high-level U.S.-China meeting was an old “so what” sophistry that didn’t work in the past and won’t work now.
Jake Sullivan, who just concluded a high-level diplomatic meeting with China, said today in an interview with Microsoft’s MSNBC that the U.S. side was clear that the talks were tough and would be direct and frank, and that the U.S. side covered many issues of deep concern to China Policy, whether it was Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Tibet, or Taiwan. But the two sides also touched on areas of cross-cutting interest, including Iran, Afghanistan, and climate change.
Sullivan and Secretary of State Antony Blinken held three rounds of talks with Yang Jiechi, Director of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the CPC Central Committee, and Wang Yi, State Councilor and Foreign Minister, in Anchorage, Alaska, over two days on the 18th and 19th. The two sides exchanged heated words in their speeches before the first round of talks, and their positions were at odds with each other.
Sullivan said the key to the U.S. side’s desire to communicate with China is to work together on these issues, not because China is giving the U.S. side favors or can make the U.S. side concede on other issues, but because there are areas in the U.S.-China relationship that are in the U.S. national interest to work together, but there are also parts of the relationship that the U.S. side strongly opposes as intolerable behavior, “and that’s what we’re doing today with the That’s why we’re working with our allies today to impose sanctions on the Chinese Communist Party for its treatment of the Uighurs in Xinjiang.
Shortly before Sullivan’s interview with MSNBC, the State Department and Treasury Department issued the latest wave of sanctions against the CCP, invoking the Global Magnitsky sanctions against Wang Junzheng, party secretary of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, and Chen Mingguo, head of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region’s Public Security Department. Chen Mingguo, head of the Public Security Department. The European Union (EU) also took the lead in sanctioning Chen Mingguo, Wang Junzheng, Wang Mingshan, a member of the Standing Committee of the Party Committee of the Xinjiang Autonomous Region, Zhu Hailun, former deputy director of the Standing Committee of the Xinjiang Autonomous Region People’s Congress, and the Public Security Bureau of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps on the grounds of human rights violations.
Regarding the effectiveness of the sanctions, Sullivan said he does not believe that any particular sanction is the full picture of policy, but is part of an overall strategy and is an important tool used in conjunction with other tools to send a clear message expressing opposition to the policies adopted by the CCP and also to impose costs on China, especially on individuals or entities that have engaged in widespread repression and cruelty against Chinese citizens.
Asked what he thought when confronted with Yang Jiechi’s rambling speech in Chinese, Sullivan said he had heard of “whataboutism,” an old play used in the old days that had been used before and “didn’t work then, and it doesn’t work now. It didn’t work then, and it doesn’t work now”.
The so-called “what aboutism” refers to a political propaganda technique used by the former Soviet Union during the Cold War, when, in the face of criticism, the Soviets would use the phrase “about… What about…” (What about…) as a response, deliberately shifting the focus to rebut opponents’ questions.
Sullivan notes that a major difference between the U.S. and China is that the Chinese Communist Party is unable to confront criticism without detaining, silencing, or even killing those critics, while the Constitution-based United States faces challenges, overcomes them, and strives to become a more perfect union.
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