U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken wrapped up his just-concluded latest visit to China with a stop at a Beijing record store where he bought albums by Taylor Swift and Chinese rocker Dou Wei in a symbolic nod to cross-cultural exchanges and understanding he had been promoting for three days
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken wrapped up his just-concluded latest visit to China with a stop at a Beijing record store where he bought albums by Taylor Swift and Chinese rocker Dou Wei in a symbolic nod to cross-cultural exchanges and understanding he had been promoting for three days.
Music, he said at the Li-Pi shop on his way to the airport late Friday, “is the best connector, regardless of geography.”
Yet Swift’s “Midnights” and Dou Wei’s “Black Dream” could just as easily represent the seemingly intractable divisions in the deeply troubled relationship between the world’s two largest economies that both sides publicly and privately blame on the other.
Blinken went out of his way to champion the importance of U.S.-China exchanges at all levels. In Shanghai, he ate at a famous soup dumpling restaurant, attended a Chinese basketball playoff game and visited with American and Chinese students at the New York University branch. In his official meetings with Chinese leaders in Beijing, he spoke repeatedly of improvements in ties over the past year.
But he also stressed that the U.S. has serious and growing concerns with China’s policies and practices on the local, regional and global stages. And, he said, the U.S. would not back down. “America will always defend our core interests and values,” he said.
On several occasions, he slammed Chinese overproduction of electric vehicles that threatened to have detrimental effects on U.S. and European automakers and complained that China was not doing enough to stop the production and export of synthetic opioid precursors.
At one point he warned bluntly that if China does not end support for Russia ’s defense industrial sector, something the Biden administration says has allowed Russia to step up its attacks on Ukraine and threaten European security, the U.S. would act to stop it. “I made clear that if China does not address this problem, we will,” Blinken told reporters after meeting with Xi.
Chinese officials were similarly direct, saying that while relations have generally improved since a low point last year over the shootdown of a Chinese surveillance balloon, they remained fraught.
“The two countries should help each other succeed rather than hurt each other, seek common ground and reserve differences rather than engage in vicious competition, and honor words with actions rather than say one thing but do the opposite,” Xi told Blinken in a not-so-veiled accusation of U.S. hypocrisy.
Wang, the foreign minister, said China is fed up with what it considers to be U.S. meddling in human rights, Taiwan and the South China Sea and efforts to restrict its trade and relations with other countries. “Negative factors in the relationship are still increasing and building and the relationship is facing all kinds of disruptions,” he said. He urged the U.S. “not to step on China’s red lines on China’s sovereignty, security, and development interests.”
Or, as Yang Tao, the director general of North American and Oceania affairs at the Foreign Ministry, put it, according to the official Xinhua News Agency: “If the United States always regards China as its main rival, China-US relations will continuously face troubles and many problems.”
Still, Blinken pressed engagement on all levels. He announced a new agreement to hold talks with China on the threats posed by artificial intelligence but lamented a dearth of American students studying in China – fewer than 900 now, compared to more than 290,000 Chinese in the U.S. He said both sides wanted to increase that number.
“We have an interest in this, because if our future leaders – whether it’s in government, whether it’s in business, civil society, climate, tech, and other fields – if they’re going to be able to collaborate, if they want to be able to solve big problems, if they’re going to be able to work through our differences, they’ll need to know and understand each other’s language, culture, history,” he said. But he added a caveat the Chinese were likely to see as a barb.
“What I told my PRC counterparts on this visit is if they want to attract more Americans here to China, particularly students, the best way to do that is to create the conditions that allow learning to flourish anywhere – a free and open discussion of ideas, access to a wide range of information, ease of travel, confidence in the safety, security, and privacy of the participants,” Blinken said.
Those are issues that neither Taylor Swift nor Dou Wei can overcome.
Western countries used a regular U.N.-backed review of China’s human rights record Tuesday to press Beijing to do more to allow freedom of expression, protect the rights of ethnic minorities and to repeal a national security law in Hong Kong that troubles independent activists.
China’s ambassador in Geneva, Chen Xu, led a delegation from some 20 Chinese ministries for the “universal periodic review” conducted under the U.N. Human Rights Council. He stressed China’s progress in poverty eradication, said citizens engage in “democratic elections” and gave assurance that freedom of religious belief is safeguarded.
“China upholds respect for and protection of human rights as a task of importance in state governance,” Chen said through an interpreter. “We have embarked on a path of human rights development that is in keeping with the trend of the times and appropriate to China’s national conditions and so-called historic achievements in this process.”
An extraordinarily high number of more than 160 countries — some critics of Beijing, some allies — registered to take part in the discussion. That meant each country had a maximum of 45 seconds to speak, forcing some ambassadors into what at times felt like a speed-reading exercise.
China’s delegation had a total of 70 minutes to make its case.
Ambassador Leslie Norton of Canada urged China to end “enforced disappearances targeting human rights defenders, ethnic minorities and Falun Gong practitioners.” Falun Gong is a spiritual movement.
Czech Ambassador Vaclav Balek said China needed to stop “the criminalization of religious and peaceful civil expression” and “cross-border kidnappings and intimidating Chinese citizens living abroad.” Slovenian Ambassador Anita Pipan recommended that China “establish a moratorium on the death penalty. ”
U.K. Ambassador Simon Manley called for a halt to the prosecution of Jimmy Lai, a former Hong Kong publisher who is on trial for alleged national security violations, and an end to the forced repatriation of North Koreans who fled into China.
Kozo Honsei, Japan’s deputy permanent representative in Geneva, called for better protection of the rights of minorities in Tibet and northwestern China’s Xinjiang region. U.S. Ambassador Michele Taylor presented a list of concerns, concluding with, “We condemn the ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang and transnational repression to silence individuals abroad.”
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Some independent organizations and the United States have accused China of genocide against minority Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang, but no U.N. bodies have affirmed that. China lashed out at a 2022 report by the U.N.’s then-human rights chief citing possible crimes against humanity committed in the region.
The “universal periodic review” puts all U.N. member states up for scrutiny — at times sharp — by other countries roughly every five years. The 3 1/2-hour discussion aims to offer constructive criticism and to yield a written report with recommendations. On Monday, countries examined Saudi Arabia’s rights record.
At China’s last review in 2018, the United States and other countries voiced concerns about its treatment of Muslim Uyghurs in Xinjiang.
Groups that included Falun Gong practitioners, Uyghurs and pro-Tibet activists held small demonstrations outside the U.N. Geneva compound during Tuesday’s discussion. Inside, roughly 100 activists from nongovernmental groups attended the session or watched it from a “spillover room” in the vast complex, officials said.
Another advocacy group sent representatives to speak out against the forced repatriation from China of women from North Korea who fled the nation under leader Kim Jong Un’s rule.
American and Filipino forces launched their largest combat exercises in years Monday in a show of allied firepower near the disputed South China Sea that has alarmed Beijing.
The annual exercises by the longtime treaty allies will run until May 10 and involve more than 16,000 of their military personnel, along with more than 250 French and Australian forces.
While the Philippine military maintains that the Balikatan — Tagalog for “shoulder-to-shoulder” — trainings are not directed at a particular country, some of their main conflict scenarios are set in or near the disputed South China Sea, where Chinese and Philippine coast guard and accompanying ships have figured in a series of increasingly tense territorial faceoffs since last year.
In encounters in disputed areas, Chinese coast guard vessels have resorting to water cannons, blocking and other dangerous maneuvers that have caused injuries to Philippine navy personnel and damaged supply boats.
As the disputes between China and the Philippines have escalated, President Joe Biden and his administration has repeatedly warned that the United States is obligated to defend the Philippines, its oldest treaty ally in Asia, if it is attacked.
U.S. Marine Lt. Gen. William Jurney said in the ceremony that the large-scale military exercises will demonstrate that the 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty between the U.S. and the Philippines “is no mere piece of paper.”
Washington lays no claim to the contested waters but has declared that freedom of navigation and overflight and the peaceful resolution of the disputes are in its national interest.
China strongly criticized the exercises, saying the Philippines was “ganging up” with countries from outside Asia in an obvious reference to the United States and its security partners, and warned that the drills could instigate confrontation and undermine regional stability.
The combat drills will include a joint sail by the U.S., Philippine and French navies in and near disputed waters off the western Philippine province of Palawan, the sinking of a mock enemy ship by combined U.S. and Philippine firepower, and the retaking of an occupied island off the northwestern Philippines, according to the Philippine military.
China specifically opposed the transport of a U.S. ground-launched missile system to the northern Philippines ahead of the exercises. No missile would be fired but the aim was to build familiarity among military participants with the hi-tech weaponry in a tropical setting.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian expressed China’s grave concern over the deployment of the missile system “at China’s doorstep.”
“The U.S. move exacerbates tensions in the region and increases the risk of misjudgement and miscalculation,” he said in response to a question in a news briefing in Beijing last week. “The Philippines needs to think twice about being a cat’s paw for the U.S. at the expense of its security interests and stop sliding down the wrong path.”
The Biden administration has been strengthening an arc of alliances to better counter China, including in a possible confrontation over Taiwan, an island democracy that Beijing claims as its own.
That dovetails with efforts by the Philippines under President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. to defend its territorial interests by boosting joint military exercises with the U.S. He has also allowed rotating batches of American forces to stay in additional Philippine military camps under a 2014 defense pact, including in his country’s north, which lies just a sea border away from Taiwan and southern China.