US President Joe Biden has provided insight into his two-hour telephone conversation last month with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平). At a CNN town hall, Anderson Cooper asked Biden about the Uighurs and China’s human rights record.
“We must speak up for human rights. It’s who we are,” Biden said. “My comment to him was, and I know him well, and he knows me well... The central principle of Xi Jinping is that there must be a united, tightly controlled China, and he uses his rationale for the things he does based on that. I pointed out to him, no American president can be sustained as a president if he doesn’t reflect the values of the United States, and so the idea I’m not going to speak out against what he’s doing in Hong Kong, what he’s doing with the Uighurs in western mountains of China, and Taiwan, trying to end the ‘one China’ policy by making it forceful.”
Apparently, the rapport established when both men were second in line for national leadership has survived Biden’s calling Xi “a thug” during the campaign.
Biden explained Xi’s position, saying: “He gets it. Culturally, there are different norms in each country and their leaders are expected to follow.”
Translation: Thuggishness is expected of a Chinese communist ruler.
Cooper pressed Biden, saying: “When you talked to him, though, about human rights abuses, is that as far as it goes in terms of the US, or is there any actual repercussions for China?”
“Well, there will be repercussions for China and he knows that,” Biden said. “What I’m doing is making clear that we, in fact, are going to continue to reassert our role as spokespersons for human rights at the UN and other agencies that have an impact on their attitude.”
“China is trying very hard to become the world leader ... and to be able to do that they have to gain the confidence of other countries. And as long as they’re engaged in activity that is contrary to basic human rights, it’s going to be hard for them to do that, but it’s much more complicated. I shouldn’t try to talk China policy in 10 minutes on television,” Biden said.
(Former US president Donald Trump expressed a similar reservation.)
The Biden administration seemed to be confronting a monumental political dilemma: bring criminal charges against Chinese leaders, potentially including Xi, or ignore a massive moral challenge from China and stand accused, even by Biden-friendly media, of extreme human rights hypocrisy.
Yet suddenly Biden was thrown a lifeline with the disclosure of a US Department of State legal dissent that began under Trump.
Although Biden and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken have called China’s Uighur persecution “genocide,” the deparment’s lawyers demurred.
They say that the mass rapes, forced abortions and sterilizations, and abominable conditions in China’s concentration camps are more aptly described as “crimes against humanity” — a slightly less pejorative label that incurs no formal obligations to act under international or US humanitarian law.
That escape hatch makes it even less likely that Biden’s “repercussions” for China would be more than ritualistic condemnation. That is far better than Trump’s reported endorsement of the Xinjiang camps as an acceptable price to pay for a trade deal, but it is not nearly commensurate with former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo’s historic genocide finding.
On other China issues, neither Cooper nor audience members asked Biden to reveal more on his extended conversation with Xi — how, for example, the two engaged on the potentially explosive issue of Taiwan.
Biden tweeted earlier that he cautioned Xi on China’s “coercion of Taiwan.”
Beijing’s readout of their phone conversation said Xi called “the Taiwan question China’s internal affair.”
Did Biden repudiate or reinforce Trump’s stern private warning of an appropriate US response to Chinese aggression against Taiwan? If so, did Xi invoke the call of a Chinese admiral to “sink one or two US aircraft carriers and kill 5,000 to 10,000 American sailors” or a Chinese general’s apocalyptic warning of nuclear attacks on “hundreds of American cities”?
Did Biden demand that Xi reprimand and rein in his subordinates’ barbaric threats? Did he tell Xi that, rather than Taiwanese “independence means war,” as China’s defense spokesman warned in January, the US’ position is that war means independence? That is, not only would the US come to Taiwan’s defense, but it would officially recognize it as a separate sovereign state.
That would dispense finally with Beijing’s false “one China” principle that Taiwan is or ever has been part of communist China. It also would abandon the US’ flaccid “one China” policy that “acknowledges” Beijing’s position as long as unification is done peacefully.
China’s escalating threats and expanding rehearsals to attack Taiwan have destroyed the precondition for the US’ switch of diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing. Threats of force also contravene Article 1 of the UN Charter.
Biden, like all of his predecessors, is reluctant to utter publicly four little words with enormous moral and geostrategic consequence — “America will defend Taiwan” — which Trump only implied in a Fox News interview.
By contrast, since the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act was implemented, bipartisan US Congresses have pressed Democratic and Republican administrations to be more forthright in supporting Taiwan’s democratic security.
The Congress is now considering a Taiwan Invasion Prevention Act (TIPA), which “establishes a limited authorization for the President to use military force for the specific purpose of securing and protecting Taiwan against armed attack.”
TIPA would end the US’ strategic ambiguity and help dissuade China from preparing for actual conflict. The US House of Representatives passed the bill last year, but Trump, preoccupied with the COVID-19 pandemic, the economy and re-election, did nothing to advance it.
Biden, with control of both chambers and bipartisan congressional consensus, can reduce the risk of Beijing’s calamitous miscalculation by supporting strategic clarity on Taiwan. It would strengthen his hand for the next conversation with Xi.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki on Feb. 16 said: “I can assure you this president is not looking to the previous president for guidance on his foreign policy.”
However, the administration should avoid a wholesale rejection of its predecessor’s policies merely for the sake of being “not Trump.” Biden would benefit by building on what Trump’s national security team — if not always Trump himself — got right about China.
Policy differences and mixed signals are not unique to the Trump administration. In addition to divisions over Uighur genocide, the State Department has derailed Biden’s opposition to Russia’s oil pipeline to Germany.
Joseph Bosco served as China country director in the office of the US secretary of defense. He is a fellow at the Institute for Taiwan-American Studies and a member of the advisory committee of the Global Taiwan Institute.
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