Acrimony marks Biden teams’ talks with Beijing
WASHINGTON — President 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 that concluded Friday in Anchorage, Alaska, two of Biden’s most senior officials traded barbs with their Chinese counterparts and failed to show any signs of agreement on numerous outstanding issues, from trade to human rights.
“We knew going in, there are a number of areas where we are fundamentally at odds,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Friday after the tense meetings ended. “It’s no surprise when we raised these issues, really indirectly, we got a defensive response.”
In Washington, Biden said he was satisfied with the meetings despite the frigid and sometimes rambunctious tone. “I’m very proud of the secretary of state,” Biden said.
White House deputy spokeswoman Karine JeanPierre also sought to downplay what she called “exaggerated diplomatic presentations” by Chinese officials. “We knew this was going to be a tough discussion, a frank discussion … but we’re still moving towards diplomacy, and that is the goal here,” she said.
The Chinese were less sanguine.
“When the Chinese delegation arrived in Anchorage, their hearts were chilled by the biting cold as well as the reception by their American host,” Zhao Lijian, one of China’s famed Wolf Warriors, sonamed for their practice of aggressive diplomacy, said Friday at a news conference in Beijing.
The scene in Alaska was quite a departure from the usual polite, anodyne opening meet-and-greet. Blinken quickly and pointedly listed several of Beijing’s policies the U.S. sees as egregious, 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.”
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 Chinesestyle democracy and respect for human rights and dismissing “what is advocated by a small number of countries of the socalled ‘rulesbased’ international order.”