ANCHORAGE – Even before the Biden administration’s first face-to-face meeting with Chinese diplomats on Thursday, American officials predicted that the discussions would not go well. They were right: the traditional few minutes of initial greetings and comments dissolved into more than an hour of very public verbal jousting, confirming the expected tone of confrontation between geopolitical rivals.
American officials said the two-day talks would continue, but they immediately accused the Chinese delegation of violating the format of the delicate discussions that sought to find common ground amidst the many points of conflict between them.
Yang Jiechi, China’s top diplomat, accused the United States of taking a “condescending” approach to negotiations and said the American delegation had no right to accuse Beijing of human rights abuses or to speak on the merits of democracy.
At one point, he said the United States would do well to repair its own “ingrained” problems, pointing specifically to the Black Lives Matter movement against American racism. In another, after it appeared that the initial comments had been completed and journalists were initially instructed to leave the room to allow more in-depth discussions to begin, Yang accused the United States of being inconsistent in its defense of a free press.
“I don’t think the vast majority of countries in the world would recognize the universal values espoused by the United States, or that the opinions of the United States could represent international public opinion,” said Yang through an interpreter. “And these countries would not recognize that the rules made by a small number of people would serve as a basis for the international order.”
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken initially looked surprised, but took a more resolute tone. He had opened negotiations by saying that the Biden government’s diplomacy was intended to “promote the interests of the United States and strengthen rules based on international order”.
“The alternative to a rule-based order is a world in which you can do right and the winners take everything,” said Blinken. “And that would be a much more violent and unstable world for all of us.”
But after Yang’s long comments – which American officials called a breach of an agreement that limited initial comments to two minutes – Blinken gestured for about a dozen journalists to remain waiting for his response.
In an implicit contrast to China, Blinken said the United States has a long history of openly confronting its shortcomings, “not trying to ignore them, not trying to pretend they don’t exist, trying to sweep them under the rug.” And he remembered a meeting more than a decade ago between Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Xi Jinping, when the two men, who now lead their respective countries, were vice presidents.
“It is never a good bet to bet against America,” said Biden at the time, according to Blinken, who added: “That remains true even today.”
As journalists were again asked to leave after the American response, Mr. Yang turned directly to the TV cameras and said, in English, “Wait”. He then launched another long-running critique of US policy.
Several times over the course of an hour, Beijing diplomats criticized the new economic sanctions that were issued against 24 Chinese officials on the eve of the negotiations. “This is not how you should welcome your guests,” said Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi.
The sanctions punished Chinese officials who, according to the Biden government, undermined democracy in Hong Kong by rewriting the territory’s electoral laws and promoting changes in its flexible Communist Party-controlled legislature. Biden government officials had previously said that the sanctions were not deliberately programmed to affect the negotiations in Anchorage.
But they clearly offended Chinese diplomats, who took them as evidence that diplomatic openness was not intended to lay down ground rules for a bilateral understanding of each capital’s priorities, but to give the United States an internal platform to embarrass Beijing.
Tit-for-tat, which a senior US official described as “arrogance” by the Chinese to their domestic audience, left little doubt that not much could be achieved with diplomatic discussions. However, the official said later, the discussion cooled down after journalists left the room, and generated a substantive conversation that lasted much longer than originally planned.
After an often conflicting strategy to deal with China over the past four years – which opposes President Donald J. Trump’s desire for a trade deal against punishing Beijing for its rampant abuses against the Uighur minority, military aggression in regional waters and refusal in immediately addressing the coronavirus outbreak – the Biden administration sought to take a new approach.
The new policy towards China is based mainly on competition – economic and diplomatic – but it is also prepared to cooperate alternately or confront Beijing when necessary. The talks in Anchorage were intended to establish a baseline for this approach.
It is now unclear how much cooperation between the two nations will be possible, although this is necessary to achieve a number of common goals, including limiting Iran’s nuclear program and North Korea’s weapons systems.
Senior officials in the Biden government had already joked that hopes of making much progress in the negotiations were so low that it would be more efficient for both sides to simply fax over their respective talking points.