When John Kerry was announced as the US special presidential envoy for climate by the administration of US President Joe Biden, he said that his cause would not be subordinated to any of the other critical issues in US-China relations, nor would it be used to trade off another area of concern.
In a March speech, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the US’ relationship with China “will be competitive when it should be, collaborative when it can be, and adversarial when it must be.”
However, Beijing rejected the idea of compartmentalization. Lu Xiang (呂祥) of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences said: “US officials would be too naive if they believe China will accept dialogue and cooperation with no basis for equality and mutual respect.”
Kerry later learned that China meant what it said, and the Biden administration might have to eat his words. He traveled to Tianjin in northeastern China, which now seems to be the designated holding place for US supplicants seeking meetings with Chinese counterparts. Kerry asked to meet with Chinese Special Envoy on Climate Change Xie Zhenhua (解振華).
However, although Kerry flew almost 24,000km for the meeting, it never took place in person. Instead, Xie spoke with him by video link from Beijing, a call that just as easily could have been handled by Kerry in Washington.
China did not say the unorthodox arrangement was related to COVID-19 concerns, and it is widely seen as a diplomatic snub, perhaps as payback because the Biden administration shunted off the first high-level diplomatic meeting with Blinken and US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan to Anchorage, Alaska, instead of Washington.
Xie did have a face-to-face meeting in Beijing with US Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman in July, where he advised her that US-China relations were in a state of “deadlock” that needed to be broken by some cooperative action. Climate issues have been the go-to example the Biden administration invariably mentions when describing areas where the US and China can cooperate rather than compete with or confront each other.
Kerry was prepared to tell his Chinese interlocutors that China’s continued use and expansion of coal-fired plants was not an example of cooperation in meeting the world’s existential environmental challenge.
However, even before the substantive talks got under way, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) joined the video link and immediately set an adversarial tone. He lectured Kerry that climate cooperation would not be possible without better overall US-China relations, again rejecting Blinken’s and Kerry’s call for compartmentalization of issues.
Wang said Washington, under the administration of former president Donald Trump and Biden’s so far, had made a “major strategic miscalculation [that caused] the sudden deterioration of bilateral relations in recent years.”
He warned: “the US side wants the climate change cooperation to be an ‘oasis’ of China-US relations ... cooperation on climate change cannot be divorced from the overall situation of China-US relations... The ball now is in the US court.”
Wang laid out specifics on what Washington must do if it wants China’s cooperation on climate change: The US should “attach importance to and actively respond to the ‘two lists’ and ‘three bottom lines’ put forward by China.”
The demands were first presented to Sherman by Xie during her Beijing visit.
The “three bottom lines” are essentially three noes to govern US behavior toward China: No “challenge, slander or attempt to subvert the path and system of socialism with Chinese characteristics”; no “attempt to obstruct or interrupt China’s development process” through sanctions, tariffs, “long-arm jurisdiction,” or “technology blockades”; and no infringement on “China’s state sovereignty or territorial integrity,” i.e., Taiwan, Hong Kong, Xinjiang and Tibet.
The “two lists” comprise cases of visa restrictions on individual Chinese citizens, constraints on the activities of individuals and institutions in the US, and sanctions on Chinese Communist Party officials for their human rights abuses.
Kerry told the news media that he found the talks “very constructive and detailed,” and said: “I will certainly pass on [to the president] the full nature of the message that I received from Chinese leaders. On the one hand, we’re saying to them, ‘You have to do more to help deal with the climate,’ and on the other hand, their solar panels are being sanctioned, which makes it harder for them to sell them.”
Kerry’s comments suggest he might be having second thoughts about not allowing his portfolio to undermine the US’ concerns regarding human rights and other matters. He has discovered that China has no intention of allowing the international focus on climate issues to undermine its own perceived core interests. While Western and other countries might be worrying about the survival of the planet, Beijing’s priority is the survival of the Chinese Communist Party.
In May, US National Security Council Indo-Pacific Coordinator Kurt Campbell, who manages the China portfolio for Sullivan, said the period of Chinese engagement, for which he advocated for decades, had “come to an end... The dominant paradigm between China and the US would now be one of competition.”
Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Zhao Lijian (趙立堅) responded that it was “completely wrong” for Washington to define the bilateral relationship as competitive and said Beijing “firmly rejected the US’ efforts to exclude, contain and suppress China under the banner of competition.”
Zhao was right that competition is the wrong term to describe the US-China relationship, now that Beijing has explicitly taken climate cooperation off the table. It is once again worse than Campbell portrayed it. Using Blinken’s taxonomy of cooperation, competition and confrontation, the relationship can be described as predominantly adversarial.
That has been the case all along, though Beijing was happy to allow the West to believe it was in a cooperative, “win-win” relationship. It was not until the Trump administration that Washington recognized it had been the target in a one-sided cold war, and decided to confront its adversary more openly.
The Biden team has a mixed record so far, following most of the Trump administration’s confrontational approach, strengthening it in a few instances, and weakening it in some others.
It might be that the climate change issue, which many of the world’s governments see as existential for humanity, will do what human rights concerns, trade violations, cybertheft, and maritime and territorial aggression have failed to accomplish. That is, to demonstrate that China is an outlaw power that should be confronted by a global coalition of like-minded nations in a concerted, sustained manner, using economic, informational and other non-kinetic means before a military confrontation becomes inevitable.
President Biden’s humiliating and catastrophic retreat from Afghanistan made that outcome dangerously more likely.
Joseph Bosco, who served as China country director in the office of the US secretary of defense, is a fellow of the Institute for Taiwan-American Studies and a member of the Global Taiwan Institute’s advisory committee.
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