The official media strongly encouraged Chinese diplomats to make harsh remarks during the Sino-US talks, provoking a boil of nationalist sentiment in China. Are we still suffering from the foreigners?” were repeated on TV stations around the country and made into T-shirts for wide publicity.
Since the founding of the Chinese Communist Party, no diplomat, even during the Cultural Revolution, has ever cursed like this in a diplomatic negotiation, much less called the other side “foreigners” to their faces. In the Trump era, China has taken a series of boycotts, countermeasures, sanctions and exclusionary measures against China, but China has remained pleasant in various trade negotiations with the United States. When Biden came on the scene, how could it instead assume a fierce posture? If China’s opponent this Time was not Blinken, but Pompeo, would they have spoken like this? And would Pompeo’s response have been the same as Blinken’s?
The answer to both questions is: Definitely not.
In response to Yang Jiechi’s accusation that the United States discriminates against blacks, Blinken said weakly that the United States “understands that it is not perfect, that it makes mistakes, but that it will fix them. This is not true because the United States does not have laws or institutions that discriminate against blacks. If Pompeo had said he would “not listen to what he says, but watch what he does” with China, he would have stood up and walked away, and then taken further sanctions and decoupled. Or, as Pompeo said afterward, “I would ask what they’ve done to the world, where Wuhan pneumonia has taken millions of lives, billions of dollars.”
China is suddenly putting on a stink face in front of the new Biden Administration, not because Biden is tougher and more resistant to China, but, on the contrary, because Biden is weak, so China thinks it can be bullied.
Polls show that 73 percent of people in the United States are antipathetic to China, and the Biden administration responds to public opinion with some superficially righteous words. But in terms of concrete actions, Biden postponed the effective date of the ban on investment in Chinese military companies, suspended the TikTok ban and banned officials from using the term “Chinese virus”; after speaking with Xi Jinping, Biden told television stations that “[the U.S. president] doesn’t have to speak out against “China’s actions in Hong Kong, Xinjiang and Taiwan,” adding that “culturally, each country and its leaders follow different norms.”
Blurring the fundamental difference between having or not having political rights by accommodating different cultures, Yang Jiechi then found a soft spot for the left gum, saying, “The United States has American-style democracy and China has Chinese-style democracy.” But he added, “American democracy should be evaluated not only by Americans, but also by the people of the world, and it is not up to the United States alone to say how well American democracy is doing.” Except that democracy in China is not measured by the universal values of the people of the world, but by China alone.
China, of course, has seen the Biden administration change its approach to Iran, return to the Paris Climate Agreement and return to the WHO, so Yang Jiechi said that the international order is an order with the United Nations at its core, not an order advocated by a small number of countries themselves. What kind of order the UN and its related organizations are under the control of the majority of uncivilized countries in power with interests linked to China is evident in the composition of the WHO and the Human Rights Council.
The Democratic Party of the United States, being progressive, is concerned with internal affairs, and foreign affairs is completely unconcerned with whether the United States leads the world and stabilizes it, and whether it has to prevent the expansion of dictatorial states. They believe that the United States should not mess with China, and that whether or not the new pneumonia originated in China, it should not be called “Chinese pneumonia” in order to avoid stirring up racial discrimination against Asians in the United States. Prior to the U.S.-China talks, the New York Times published an article by Ian Johnson on March 19, calling on the Biden administration to offer an olive branch to China, including lifting curbs on the Confucius Institute, restoring visas for Chinese Communist Party members, reinstating Chinese Communist news organizations in the U.S., and reopening the Chinese Consulate in Huston.
These signs of weakness in rhetoric and actions are what prompted Chinese diplomats to send harsh words to the United States. China has been angry with the Trump Administration for a long time, and it can’t afford not to take it out! The concern is whether this kind of harsh words will develop into a military adventure because of the estimation of US weakness.
19 Pompeo wrote in a tweet: strength to deter bad guys, weakness to invite war. The risk of either a war in the Taiwan Strait or North Korea restarting nuclear weapons has increased.
Recent Comments