Critics say U.S. weighs climate vs. other issues on China
U.S. envoy John Kerry’s diplomatic quest to stave off the worst scenarios of global warming is meeting resistance from China, the world’s biggest climate polluter, which is adamant that the United States ease confrontation over other matters if it wants Beijing to speed up its climate efforts.
Rights advocates and Republican lawmakers say they see signs, including softer language and talk of heated internal debate among Biden administration officials, that China’s pressure is leading the United States to back off on criticism of China’s mass detentions, forced sterilization and other abuses of its predominantly Muslim Uyghur minority in the Xinjiang region.
President Joe Biden came out strong from the start of his presidency with sanctions over China’s abuse of the Uyghurs, and his administration this spring called it genocide. But the U.S. desire for fast climate progress versus China’s desire that the U.S. back off on issues such as human rights and religious freedom is creating conflict between two top Biden goals: steering the world away from the climate abyss and tempering China’s rising influence.
It would be “disastrous in the long term for the United States government to backtrack, tone down, let the Chinese manipulate the issue,” said Nury Turkel, a Uyghur advocate and the vice chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, an advisory panel that makes policy recommendations to the White House and Congress.
Chinese leaders repeatedly linked the issue of climate change and their complaints over perceived U.S. confrontation on human rights and other issues during Kerry’s most recent China trip this month, Kerry told reporters in a call.
The Chinese complained specifically about sanctions the administration has put on China’s globally dominant solar panel industry, which the U.S. and rights groups say runs partly on the forced labor of imprisoned Uyghurs.
“My response to them was, ‘Hey, look, climate is not ideological, it’s not partisan, it’s not a geostrategic weapon or tool, and it’s certainly not, you know, day-today politics,’ ” said Kerry.
China in 2019 pumped out 27 percent of climate-eroding fossil fuel fumes, more than the rest of the developed world combined. The United States is the secondworst offender, at 11 percent.
That makes China central to the world’s fast-evaporating hopes of cutting fumes from use of petroleum and coal before catastrophic climate change becomes inevitable and irreversible.
Kerry and others see November’s U.N. climate summit in Scotland as a last chance to make significant emissions cuts in time. Climate efforts will also be a theme of leaders at the U.N. General Assembly this coming week.
President Xi Jinping has said China will be climate pollution neutral by 2060, a decade later than the U.S. and other countries have pledged.
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told the U.S. diplomat in a video meeting on Kerry’s latest China trip that “China-U.S. cooperation on climate change cannot be divorced from the overall situation of China-U.S. relations.”
The U.S. should “take positive actions to bring China-U.S. relations back on track,” Wang added, according to a Foreign Ministry statement.
“The Chinese believe that the U.S. needs cooperation from China more than China needs the United States,” said Bonnie Glaser, an expert on Asia and Asia security matters at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.