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The lose-lose Alaska meeting | Wang Dan

蘋果日報 2021/03/25 09:40


The meeting between Chinese and American high-ranking diplomats in Alaska ended on a sour note, which was expected. However, Chinese top diplomats’ wolf warrior diplomacy has triggered an uproar. What should have been a dull diplomatic meeting has triggered a storm that is in no way negligible. The western mainstream media has focused on the aggressive diplomacy adopted by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which has seemed to put China in a very bad light. Detailed analysis, however, gives us the conclusion that neither China nor the US has emerged victorious in the Alaska meeting. There is a lose-lose situation.

China put on political show as the US got blindsided

Undoubtedly, China has lost for three reasons. First, from the US’s choice of the meeting location, its refusal to acknowledge that the meeting would be a “strategic dialogue” and its sanctions on Chinese senior officials announced the day before the meeting, the US made a huge effort to flex its muscles prior to the meeting. Faced with such an arrangement that bordered on humiliation, China did not cancel the meeting but went all the way to Alaska, which put itself at a disadvantage. Second, as the CCP’s chief diplomat, Yang Jiechi made a performance in the meeting, which can only be described as ignominious and only served to make a joke of China in front of the world and fuel further resentment from Western countries towards China. In Yu Maochun’s words, it was a complete “diplomatic failure”. Third, the two sides made the scene so ugly that at least in the short term, Sino-US relations will not get any better. The hawks in the US Congress will have a louder voice, and the Biden administration will be under greater pressure from public opinion. All this will dash China’s hope of the US’s de-escalation of the Sino-US trade war, which China had hoped for more than anything else.
The US also lost for two reasons. First, a boorish, disrespectful Yang Jiechi got to rant and rave in front of the US’s top diplomats when so many media outlets were watching. A humiliation that the US has rarely suffered on diplomatic occasions, it has sent China’s young jingoistic nationalists into an ecstasy. Judging from this perspective, the US was humiliated by China. Antony Blinken’s polite rebuttal actually put himself at a disadvantage. Even the mainstream and left-leaning media in the US have had no lack of criticism of the Biden administration’s weakness.
The Wall Street Journal published a commentary on Sunday under the name of its Editorial Board, arguing that while Blinken’s response was true enough, it was “needlessly defensive after a foreigner’s public assault on US interests and values”. This cannot be an isolated view from a specific media outlet.
Secondly, the US has walked straight into the CCP’s trap. That the CCP endured the humiliation and took part in the meeting nevertheless must have meant that it had to carry out an important, special mission. As observers have all seen, the mission was to put on a political show for the Chinese people that could showcase Xi Jinping’s hardline nationalist stance and arouse nationalist sentiments in China, thus further consolidating Xi’s leadership.
Just the day after Yang made a performance of the meeting, the Chinese state media People’s Daily published three photos in quick succession. It even made the highly unusual move of putting the photo of the signature of the Boxer Protocol (Xinchou Treaty) in 1901 together with the so-called “strategic dialogue” in question that also took place in a Xinchou year in the Chinese calendar. Obviously, everything was prepared in advance.
The US seems to have failed to judge the real intention of China in the meeting correctly. It was blindsided and dumbfounded, and had to bring back reporters to the meeting room as a counterattack to score a point. Judging from the hasty response, the US was tricked by China.

Biden’s lack of vigilance against Xi

Both sides have stated that the recent China-US diplomatic summit was nailed down during the telephone call between China’s and the US’s top leaders. We can therefore roughly determine that the calculations of the two leaders were behind the war of words between the two countries’ top diplomats in Alaska. On the telephone call, Xi Jinping expressed the hope that both sides could resume dialogue, which must have been related to the calculations about China’s domestic politics as discussed above. Biden does not seem to have been vigilant enough against Xi Jinping, as he agreed without careful thought. In fact, a White House insider has been quoted by the American media as saying that it was obviously a mistake to rashly agree to a high-level dialogue with China without adequate preparation. Judging from the reactions of Blinken and others during the meeting, this should not have been a problem with the US’s diplomatic system. The problem lies with Biden’s lack of vigilance against and ongoing illusions about Xi Jinping. Frankly speaking, this is the most worrying issue.
(Wang Dan, founder of the think tank Dialogue China.)
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