Secretary of State John Blinken and National Security Advisor Sullivan will meet with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Yang Jiechi, Director of the Office of the Foreign Affairs Commission of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, in Alaska on March 18. This is the highest level meeting between the U.S. and China since Biden took office. The meeting was preceded by a lot of wishful thinking by American China-lovers who hoped that the U.S.-China relationship would return to its former harmony and could even be restarted at the push of a button, erasing the previous four years of belligerence.
The Chinese side’s rhetoric and some of the China-loving American China-talkers always speak as if the blame for the crossfire in U.S.-China relations is all on the American side. But Beijing has been bullying countries for years with its economic influence, its increasingly aggressive war-wolf diplomacy, and its concealment of the Epidemic that led to the global pandemic, and the American people, who do not have special Chinese interests, know that China is to blame for the U.S.-China bad blood. A recent Gallup poll found that the U.S. public’s negative opinion of China soared to a new high of 67% since the establishment of diplomatic relations between the U.S. and China in 1979. Positive perceptions have fallen to a new low of 33 percent, regardless of party affiliation, and are not as bad as they were after the June 4 massacre in 1989.
The Biden Administration‘s posture and layout before the high-level U.S.-China meeting already made it known in advance that the meeting would not be too cordial. The State Department announced a brief statement about the meeting, emphasizing that Blinken and Sullivan met with the Chinese on U.S. soil on their way back from a visit to Japan and South Korea, “America’s closest regional allies. The U.S. side visited Asia and did not enter China, but instead asked the Chinese side to meet with the U.S. side on U.S. soil on their way back to Washington, D.C. The Chinese side, which values the details of the meeting etiquette, would not fail to understand what kind of gesture this is. The U.S. side made such an arrangement and the Chinese side agreed to it, does it reflect the fact that the Chinese side wants the meeting more than the U.S. side and that the Chinese side wants the U.S. side more than the U.S. side wants the Chinese side?
The Chinese side was eager to say that the meeting was a “strategic dialogue”, while the U.S. side categorically denied that the meeting was not a “strategic dialogue”. Asked about the content of the meeting, both Blinken himself and a White House spokesman said the U.S. side was prepared to raise with China a number of issues on which the two sides have serious differences, including Beijing’s intensified crackdown on Hong Kong, human rights issues in Xinjiang, China’s increased military pressure on Taiwan, and Beijing’s undeclared economic retaliation against Australia.
What must have made Beijing even more furious was that, in a change from the careful way officials have spoken in the past, Blinken explicitly used the word “country” to refer to Taiwan during a Congressional Foreign Affairs Committee hearing last week, and said that Washington would take action against Beijing for violently tightening Hong Kong’s freedoms, including by expanding sanctions. This series of declarations on the eve of an important high-level meeting sends a clear signal to the American public and the Chinese side that they are taking a tough stance.
In addition to the meeting arrangements and premeeting signals, Biden also met last week with the leaders of Japan, India and Australia for the India-Pacific Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad) summit. This quadrangle originated in 2004 after the Indian Ocean tsunami when the four countries cooperated to coordinate disaster relief, but there has been no real action since then. When the Chinese challenge became more serious, the U.S. Republican-Democratic diplomatic system proposed to revitalize the Quad and raise the level of cooperation, many commentators speculated that this could be the prototype of the Indo-Pacific NATO.
Last week’s summit confirmed the specific arrangements for the four countries to cooperate in the distribution of vaccines against the global pandemic, with the United States providing vaccine technology, the United States and Japan providing funding, India responsible for production, and Australia responsible for logistics, in a direct attack on China’s vaccine diplomacy. The joint statement issued after the meeting explicitly states that it wants to build an Indo-Pacific region that is “free, open, inclusive, healthy and based on democratic values free from bullying” and mentions that it will join other allies in the region, without mentioning China, but it is clearly aimed at China everywhere.
The United States, Japan, India and Australia have a lot of economic and trade relations with China, but geopolitically, they have serious conflicts with China that are difficult to reconcile. The alliance of the four countries reflects the future Indo-Pacific situation, which will change from a U.S.-China standoff in the Trump era to a multi-national standoff against China. China is constantly provoking its neighboring countries with war-wolf diplomacy and striking out on all sides. Now the new order of the Indo-Pacific, with the four countries as the core, and then united with other U.S. allies, is slowly taking shape, and Beijing is really to blame.
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