China’s foreign minister predicts an impending collision with the U.S.
China and the United States are careering toward an inevitable collision, Foreign Minister Qin Gang said Tuesday, a day after Chinese leader Xi Jinping made a rare direct accusation that Washington was trying to contain China.
Together, the statements underscore the dire state of bilateral ties between the world’s two biggest economies, a month after a rogue balloon brought a sudden end to efforts to “put a floor” under the relationship.
In a news conference on the sidelines of the National People’s Congress, Qin, who was Beijing’s ambassador in Washington before becoming foreign minister in December, deployed a range of often colorful — and occasionally off-color — metaphors to describe the severity of tensions.
He took several swipes at the Biden administration’s stated desire to build “guardrails” to keep simmering disagreements from spiraling into crises, an effort he cast as a way of preventing China from retaliating against criticism.
“If the United States does not pump the brakes and continues to go down the wrong road, no number of guardrails will be able to stop [the relationship] from running off-road and flipping over, and it is inevitable that we will fall into conflict and confrontation,” he said at the news conference, the first time he has appeared as foreign minister at the annual meeting of China’s rubber-stamp parliament.
Accusing the United States of unfair competition for imposing sanctions on Chinese companies, Qin drew a comparison to an Olympic track-and-field event where “one party” — clearly understood to be the United States — “is not thinking about how to run the best time, but always trips the other party and even wants to send them to the Paralympics.”
On Monday, Xi took the unusual step of name-checking the United States as leader of a group of Western nations that are trying to “contain, encircle and suppress” China. He called it “a challenge of unprecedented severity to our nation’s development.”
While China’s most powerful leader in decades often talks about the country facing “changes unseen in a century” that could derail its rise, it is unusual for Xi to directly call out the United States by name, rather referring to “certain countries” whose behavior Beijing dislikes.
On the same day, Xi used a new slogan to characterize China’s strategy in the current period of challenges, saying Beijing must “be calm and maintain determination, seek progress through stability … [and] be united while daring to struggle.”
Official Chinese Communist Party media identified that sentiment as an important guide to China’s foreign policy in a period of profound changes in the international environment.
Shortly after securing a third term in power late last year, Xi appeared to modulate China’s aggressive foreign policy, making a show of pragmatism in meetings with foreign leaders.
But the would-be charm offensive has regularly fallen flat as Beijing has been unwilling to give ground on core strategic interests such as its close partnership with Russia and sovereignty claims over Taiwan. That uncompromising stance — alongside diplomatic fallout from the suspected Chinese spy balloon that traversed American airspace — has undermined the prospect of detente with Washington.
Qin’s often performative delivery on Tuesday suggested that Beijing’s assertive tone remains. At another point in the news conference, he made a show of reading from a red-covered copy of the constitution of the People’s Republic of China to underscore Beijing’s claims that the selfgoverning democracy of Taiwan is part of its “sacred territory.”
In an attempt to cast the United States as adopting double standards on international arms sales, he set U.S. military support for Taiwanese self-defense programs beside warnings from Washington not to send “lethal aid” to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“Why, while asking China not to provide arms to Russia, has the United States sold arms to Taiwan in violation of a [1982] joint communique?” Qin said, referring to a China-u.s. agreement in which the United States said it would not continue selling weapons to Taiwan indefinitely.
That position was predicated on Beijing’s demonstrating peaceful intentions toward Taiwan. The Chinese military has dramatically escalated threats toward Taiwan in recent years.
Qin’s rhetorical question, posed in the context of expressing China’s opposition to U.S. support for Taiwan, appeared to be an accusation of American hypocrisy rather than a suggestion that Beijing was preparing to supply weapons to Moscow.
Soon afterward, Qin denied that China had provided weapons to any side in the Ukraine conflict. But he added that “the more turbulent the world becomes, the more China-russia relations should make steady progress.”
“If the United States does not pump the brakes ... it is inevitable that we will fall into conflict and confrontation.”
Foreign Minister Qin Gang