US President Barack Obama on Wednesday said that his administration was ready to take action against China over online attacks carried out by Beijing or its proxies, publicly raising the specter of sanctions a week before Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) arrives in the US for a state visit.
“We are preparing a number of measures that will indicate to the Chinese that this is not just a matter of us being mildly upset, but is something that will put significant strains on the bilateral relationship if not resolved,” Obama said in a question-and-answer session with business leaders on economic issues. “We are prepared to take some countervailing actions in order to get their attention.”
“My hope is that it gets resolved short of that,” Obama said.
The remarks seemed calibrated to pressure Xi to agree to address online security concerns, which Obama said would “probably be one of the biggest topics” of the talks next week.
They also seemed to suggest that while sanctions are unlikely to be imposed on China before the summit meeting, it is increasingly likely that some penalties will be imposed afterward.
The public threat of sanctions represented an intensifying of what has until now been a quiet, although increasingly intense, effort to warn Beijing that the administration will not tolerate recent breaches and thefts of intellectual property, including one at the US Office of Personnel Management. That breach, revealed this year, compromised tens of millions of security files of US federal employees.
Obama has faced a difficult problem in deciding whether and when to apply sanctions. Some administration officials are concerned about poisoning the atmosphere for Xi’s visit and some believe that the threat of such penalties could help extract concessions.
“They’ve just run out of time to deal with sanctions before this top-level meeting,” said Patrick Cronin, the director of the Asia-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a New American Security.
“The administration is, on the one hand, looking for as much cooperation as they can get from Xi Jinping and China’s leadership and, at the same time, saying: ‘Here is the stick of sanctions. We’re not going to use it right now; we’re going to wait to see what you say at the summit about good-faith progress on cyberrules of the road, but if we’re not satisfied, sanctions will follow,’” Cronin said.
The breaches were a source of friction last month when US National Security Adviser Susan Rice traveled to Beijing to meet with top Chinese officials.
The White House said on Saturday last week that Chinese Communist Party envoy Meng Jianzhu (孟建柱) spent much of last week in Washington meeting with US security and intelligence officials on online security issues, including a session with Rice that involved a “frank and open exchange.”
“US and Chinese officials are engaged in candid, blunt discussions about our concerns in this policy area,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters on Wednesday. “You have heard the US government make clear that we have significant concerns with Chinese behavior.”
He said Obama “was intentionally nonspecific” on Wednesday over possible actions against China, although he said that the president signed an executive order this year enabling him to issue sanctions against those responsible for such attacks.
“Among states, there has to be a framework that is analogous to what we’ve done with nuclear power, because nobody stands to gain” from the attacks, Obama said on Wednesday.
He said defining such a plan “requires, I think, some tough negotiations.”
“If we and the Chinese are able to coalesce around a process for negotiations, then I think we can bring a lot of other countries along,” the president said.
Still, despite repeated efforts, Obama has been unable to bring about such a meeting of the minds on the issue.
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