U.S., China open talks with accusations and barbs
WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden is attempting to reconfigure the frayed U.S. relationship with China to be both competitive and cooperative. His administration is off to a rocky start.
In two days of talks concluding Friday in Anchorage, Alaska, two of Biden’s most senior officials have traded barbs with their Chinese counterparts and failed to show any signs of agreement on numerous outstanding issues, from trade to human rights.
Still, despite the frigid and sometimes rambunctious tone of the first faceto-face meetings of the Biden administration with China, the president said he was satisfied with the proceedings thus far.
“I’m very proud of the secretary of state,” Biden said at the White House on Friday as he departed for Atlanta.
The scene in Alaska that Biden was alluding to was quite a departure from the usual polite, anodyne opening meet-and-greet. Instead, the two countries’ representatives launched into mutual recriminations in surprisingly undiplomatic exchanges.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken quickly and pointedly listed several of Beijing’s egregious policies, including China’s harsh repression of Muslim Uyghurs, cyberattacks on the U.S. and aggression against Taiwan, actions that “threaten the rulesbased order that maintains global stability.
“That’s why they’re not merely internal matters and why we feel an obligation to raise these issues here today,” Blinken said at the start of talks Thursday.
The head of the Chinese delegation, Communist Party foreign policy chief Yang Jiechi, launched into a long rebuttal, extolling the virtues of what he called Chinese-style democracy and respect for human rights and dismissing “what is advocated by a small number of countries of the so-called ‘rulesbased’ international order.”
Yang attacked the United States’ own human rights record and its domestic turmoil over racism, violence and other problems. He claimed “polls” showed that Americans have many doubts about their democracy, while Chinese leaders remain hugely popular with their nation’s people. And he called on the United States to stop attempting to export its version of democracy.
“The challenges facing the United States in human rights are deep-seated,” Yang said. “They did not just emerge over the past four years, such as Black Lives Matter. It did not come up only recently. So we do hope that for our two countries, it’s important that we manage our respective affairs well instead of deflecting the blame on somebody else in this world.”