“This is an important opportunity for us to lay out in very frank terms the many concerns we have,” Blinken told the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Wednesday. “We’ll also explore whether there are avenues for cooperation, and we’ll talk about the competition we have with China to make sure that the United States has a level playing field and that our companies and workers benefit from that.”
The concerns, though, are legion, and were itemized by Blinken’s lawmaker interlocutors during the House briefing. At the top of the list was China’s campaign of repression of the Turkic Muslim populations of Xinjiang, which Blinken repeatedly said he believed was “genocide.” Whatever the Biden administration’s desire to find points of convergence on a range of thorny issues — from trade and intellectual property rights to cybersecurity and climate — it faces Beijing not just as a geopolitical competitor, but as an ideological adversary. That’s a posture reinforced by widespread anti-China sentiment in Washington.
Ahead of the meeting in Anchorage are other efforts from the Biden administration to reach out to Asian allies also wary of China’s rise. On Friday, Biden will meet virtually with the leaders of the “Quad,” a grouping of major democracies that puts the United States alongside Japan, India and Australia, and which, among other things, is widely perceived as a platform for regional coordination on China. Before heading to Alaska, Blinken will then hold meetings in Japan and South Korea, where he’ll be joined by Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, who is also scheduled to visit India separately.
There are no high expectations for the Alaska talks. “This is not a strategic dialogue. There’s no intent at this point for a series of follow-on engagements,” Blinken said Wednesday. “Those engagements, if they are to follow, really have to be based on the proposition that we’re seeing tangible progress and tangible outcomes on the issues of concern to us with China.”
Matthew Pottinger, a senior China policy adviser in former president Donald Trump’s White House, said the meeting should “simply set the terms of the engagement going forward,” gesturing during a webinar hosted by the Hoover Institution to the “long list of grievances on our side that would need to be addressed.” He suggested that the Biden administration present a list of 14 grievances, a reference to a 14-point list of objections that Chinese officials presented to Australian counterparts during a tense phase of diplomacy last year.
During a briefing Thursday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian issued boilerplate talking points that suggested Beijing doesn’t hold much stock in the discussions either. “We ask the United States to view China and China-U.S. relations in an objective and rational manner, reject the Cold-War and zero-sum game mentality, respect China’s sovereignty, security and development interests, and stop interfering in China’s internal affairs,” he said.
For all their political differences, the Trump and Biden administrations appear to share a common analysis of the Chinese regime, anchored around opposition to the dictatorial actions taken by President Xi Jinping and a hardening view of the role China is playing on the world stage. In speeches, Biden has spoken of the China challenge as part of a global clash between democratic values and illiberal authoritarianism. Blinken confirmed this week that the White House plans to host a “summit of democracies” toward the end of the year.
“The ideological dimension of the competition with China is inescapable,” said Pottinger. “And it may be central.”
But there are already glimmers of a robust policy response from Biden, too. After passing a $1.9 trillion domestic stimulus package, lawmakers are at work on a piece of legislation aimed at countering China’s economic influence. Though details are still unclear, it will probably propose “funding aimed at bolstering U.S. manufacturing and supply chains, among other measures,” my colleagues reported, and would have at least a degree of bipartisan support.
Then there is the political front. Beijing hammered a few more nails in the coffin of Hong Kong’s limited democracy this week. On Thursday, China’s National People’s Congress approved a resolution to overhaul the former British colony’s electoral system and ensure that only “patriots” are able to take seats in its legislature. It’s only the latest move to chill dissent and tighten Beijing’s control over the semiautonomous region, which has seen Chinese authorities strip away major political freedoms over the past year.
In Congress, lawmakers were irate. “Two years ago, the people of Hong Kong stood up to ask the Chinese Communist Party to uphold their promise of one country, two systems,” said Rep. Andy Kim (D-N.J.) in a statement, referring to Hong Kong’s mass protests in 2019 that stirred solidarity around the world, but won little meaningful support. “Today’s actions are the final death blow to that promise and constitute the true end of democracy in Hong Kong.”
