Where China is concerned, there must be no more Mr Nice Guy
Screenshot from video CGTN
While the West beats its breast over Afghanistan, China appears to be spoiling for a fight. The latest example of Beijing’s “wolf warrior diplomacy” has been occasioned by the second visit this year of John Kerry, the Biden Administration’s Special Presidential Envoy for Climate. The outburst came from the aggressive Chinese Foreign Minister, Wang Yi, who did not bother to meet Obama’s former Secretary of State in person, but ambushed him by video link. Wang’s hostility left his guest nonplussed. Given recent history of Sino-American friction, however, it should not have come as a surprise.
Kerry had come to the northern city of Tianjin to meet his Chinese counterpart to prepare for November’s COP26 climate summit in Glasgow. The two superpowers are responsible for 40 per cent of global carbon emissions, with China increasingly responsible for the lion’s share. As Dorothy Herson explained in TheArticle this week, there is so far no sign of Chinese millennials moderating their addiction to conspicuous consumption, which is driving the rise in generation of Co2. Despite President Xi Jinping’s promise to make China carbon neutral by 2060, Kerry must have known he was on a fool’s errand. Anticipating a polite rebuff, he evidently felt he had to try to find common ground on the issue of climate change.
What he was clearly not expecting, however, was a verbal onslaught so vehement that it must have been authorised by Xi himself. “The US hopes that climate change will be the oasis in China-US relations,” Wang told him. “But if the oasis is surrounded by deserts, the oasis will sooner or later become sand. The US should walk towards China, take active actions to return the bilateral relations to normal tracks.”
This is not the diplomatic language normally used between equals, but a dressing-down by a superior. However, it got worse. Not content with telling a senior American statesman what his country’s policy ought to be, Wang launched into a tirade: “In recent years relations have taken a nosedive and now face serious difficulties. The root cause is that the US has made a serious strategic misjudgment about China. The US should stop seeing China as a threat and an adversary, stop containing China around the world, but respond to [our demands] and take concrete acts to improve China-US relations.”
Leaving aside the abysmal official translation, this amounts to an ultimatum from Beijing. Either the Americans must give them a free hand, especially within their sphere of influence, or the Chinese will escalate their aggression, with unpredictable consequences.
The list of “serious difficulties” is a long one. It is headed by the demand to take back Taiwan, if necessary by force, which has been reinforced by invasion exercises. Next comes the Chinese claim to treat the whole South China Sea as territorial waters, which threatens its neighbours and maritime trade worth £3.8 trillion per annum. Then there are the persecution of China’s Uighur minority; the suppression of Hong Kong, tearing up an international treaty in the process; the refusal to allow proper investigation of the origins of the Covid pandemic in Wuhan; military espionage and intellectual property theft; strategic acquisitions aimed at global domination; support for rogue states such as North Korea and Iran; and the relentless military build-up which ultimately threatens to overtake US strategic primacy.
It is, needless to say, impossible for Biden to capitulate to Xi’s demands. That would amount to a policy of appeasement that no American President could entertain. But it is not long since Barack Obama during his two terms and even Donald Trump in his first year were treating China as a partner rather than a rival. This “golden era” in Sino-American relations did not end in 2012 when Xi Jinping took over leadership of the Chinese Communist Party and began a new bid for global supremacy. Initially the West turned a blind eye to the signs of more assertive policies in Beijing. The sea change happened when Trump dropped his first Secretary of State, the former businessman Rex Tillerson, and replaced him with Mike Pompeo, who had hitherto been Director of the CIA. Soon afterwards, Trump also hired John Bolton as his National Security Adviser.
Almost immediately, Pompeo and Bolton shifted US policy towards China from partnership to containment. The concept has a Cold War pedigree and was successful in preventing Stalin and later Khrushchev from extending Soviet influence across the developing world and even in Western Europe. It led Xi ’ s propaganda organs to demonise Pompeo and to accuse the outgoing Trump of “seeking to maliciously inflict a long-lasting scar on China-Us ties”. It is this policy of containment that Wang now denounces to Kerry’s face.
Pompeo and Bolton had no hesitation in building up ties with Taiwan and sending warships through the South China Sea without warning or permission. They also criticised internal Chinese repression and encouraged America’s allies to do the same. Bolton resigned in September 2019 after he fell out with Trump, but Pompeo stayed to the bitter end. Biden and his Secretary of State Antony Blinken have maintained a similarly critical stance towards China.
It is likely that Mike Pompeo will run for President in 2024 and by no means impossible that he will win. That would be Xi’s worst nightmare. So we must expect that in the coming years China will do what it can to cajole the Biden Administration into changing course, reverting to the more emollient relationship of the Obama era. Beijing may also cultivate the pacifist Left of the Democrats and the isolationist Right of the Republicans. In other words, we should watch out for bold attempts by Beijing to interfere in US politics.
Wang’s bullying of Kerry could be the opening shot of what is likely to be a sustained diplomatic and propaganda offensive, accompanied by the dark arts of espionage and subversion. One way for Biden to nip this sinister strategy in the bud would be to establish a bipartisan consensus on China. He could do this by inviting Pompeo and Bolton to the White House for talks with Blinken and his team. By signalling that he will not allow party rivalries to destroy the consensus on containment of China, the President would force his counterpart in Beijing to think again. Until there are signs that Xi Jinping is backing away from confrontation, there should be no more visits to China by US dignitaries and no more opportunities for Wang Yi to humiliate them. Though he is hardly naive, John Kerry is 77. He personifies the cosy diplomacy of the past. The present is another country. As far as China is concerned, there must be no more Mr Nice Guy.
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