WASHINGTON – While the Biden government has held high-level meetings with China since taking office, it enjoys broad bipartisan support to take a tough stance on Beijing, but also faces skepticism about whether the negotiations will bring real policy changes. .
President Joe Biden, whom Chinese President Xi Jinping has called an “old friend”, finds himself at a crossroads in US politics, while senior officials gather in Alaska for a two-day summit. American public opinion is overwhelmingly favorable to a confrontational stance towards China. And both Democrats and Republicans now describe China as a terrible threat, pushing for legislation to impose further sanctions on Beijing for human rights abuses and to protect American companies from China’s commercial practices.
The Biden government plans to use this rare consensus as leverage when Secretary of State Antony Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan meet on Thursday and Friday in Anchorage with China’s top diplomat, Yang Jiechi, and the Minister of Relations. China’s exteriors, Wang Yi.
Senior government officials said the United States plans to outline some specific areas where China must take steps to change the course before the relationship can substantially advance. The main points of tension on the US side include China’s increasingly aggressive military stance in the region, cyber intrusions and theft of intellectual property, commercial and economic practices and human rights abuses, including actions in Hong Kong and Xinjiang.
“What we are looking for is more than words,” said a senior government official.
Some Biden government officials and lawmakers in Congress say they are looking for the same thing as Biden.
“The new government, in some of its first directions, has elevated China. So it is there, at least on paper,” a senior intelligence official who specializes in Chinese military capabilities told NBC News. “So I am hopeful that we will not spend a lot of time continuing to diagnose the problem, but we will start to become active in implementing solutions here.”
Senator Marco Rubio, from Florida, told Fox News on Wednesday that Biden’s strategy in China is “something worth watching” and his fear is that Beijing “will attract us to an agreement that we consider so important that it doesn’t we can have China walk from it. And then they will start insisting that we stop talking about Hong Kong, stop talking about Taiwan, stop talking about Muslims [in] work camps, stop talking about those kinds of things. “
President Trump has brought unpredictability to the world stage. Biden does not, and he abandoned part of his predecessor’s harsh language towards Beijing, while taking a tougher stance on human rights. But he did not abandon Trump’s policies. Trump’s controversial tariffs on Chinese products, for example, remain in effect. That policy, like others, is still under review, government officials said.
Still, even senior government officials who served in the Obama administration admit that the problems in the U.S. relationship with China date back to Trump.
“We inherited a very challenging situation, not only from the previous government, but from a long old path,” said one.
Before the meeting in Alaska, the Biden government sent an unmistakable signal to China that it would take a tough stance with Beijing and support US allies in Asia.
During a visit to Japan, Blinken warned against “coercion and aggression” by Beijing and promised that the United States “would back down if necessary”. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who joined Blinken for talks with his Japanese counterparts in Tokyo, cited China’s “destabilizing actions” in the eastern and southern seas of China.
“They are making it very clear that they do not trust China,” said Michael Green, who oversaw China’s policy under the George W. Bush administration.
The message and symbolism of the Biden government this week, with high-level visits to the loyal allies of the United States, Japan and South Korea, seemed to aim to convey to China that there would be no return to a more conciliatory tone employed by the former Obama administration. , and that Washington would gather allies to confront Beijing, according to Green, now at the center of strategic and international studies.
Face-to-face conversations in Alaska “will not be a love festival,” said Green.
Senior officials who informed reporters before the meetings in Anchorage said they did not anticipate any political pronouncements after the meetings, which they described as something punctual, not the start of a dialogue process with the Chinese. And they said there will be no joint statement by the two countries afterwards, although such statements are customary for high-level diplomatic talks.
Instead, they said the goal is to get a sense of the Chinese’s position on key issues so they can take stock when they return home, while Biden finalizes his broader strategy for China. Notably, officials have not cited China’s handling of Covid-19 as a major concern.
The Anchorage meeting follows recent Congressional hearings in Washington, during which a senior military commander and experts warned that the United States was at risk of losing its military and technological advantage to Beijing and that China was determined to undermine the international policy based on rules. order.
The head of US forces in the Pacific, Admiral Philip Davidson, told senators last week that the superiority of the US armed forces was diminishing in the face of the massive increase in arms in China and that there was a risk that Beijing would try to take Taiwan by force. in six years.
Experts also told lawmakers that China is using its economic power to punish or coerce other governments, including Australia. Beijing imposed tariffs on a growing list of imports from Australia after Canberra called for an international investigation into how China handled the coronavirus outbreak.
In separate interviews for NBC News in the past few days, two top intelligence officials said they believed the United States government needs to significantly reorient its priorities to address what they see as an unparalleled strategic threat from China, including the transfer of resources from Middle East intelligence and military personnel for the Pacific theater. Each said they saw signs that the Biden government was prepared for this.
One noted that the Obama administration tried to “turn” to focus on Asia, but “it was never executed because we were still deeply involved in Afghanistan and Iraq”.
“Now I think it has become much more urgent, much more serious. We really need to get out of the Middle East,” said the official. “We need to think about the war with China because China is the only country that has the capacity to comprehensively challenge the United States.”