Today, Explained - AnchoRage

Episode Date: March 22, 2021

The United States and China met in Anchorage, Alaska, on Thursday to air grievances, and the cameras were rolling. Vox’s Alex Ward explains how the meeting set the stage for one of the world’s biggest rivalries. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit connectsontario.ca. It's Today Explained. I'm Sean Ramos for him. On Thursday, Chinese diplomats met with Biden diplomats for the first time in Anchorage, Alaska. Kind of like a first date. It was meant to be cordial. It ended up combustible. Two superpowers locking horns with the cameras rolling. Well, I'll continue the relationship metaphor. It's like two exes meeting after a really bad breakup. Alex Ward, one of the hosts of Vox's Worldly podcast. So you really had, with the cameras whirring, you had the U.S. side, which was Secretary of State Tony Blinken

and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, and they started off with two minutes each, basically saying like, hey, China, you do some bad stuff. In Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Taiwan, cyber attacks on the United States, economic coercion toward our allies. To which the Chinese went on a roughly 18 minute plus just lecture about what they did not like about American governance and foreign policy, such like, hey, you guys have racial issues. The challenges facing the U.S. in human rights are deep-seated.

They did not emerge over the past four years. The slaughter of black people, the problem existed for a long time. You know, we're not the country going around the world starting wars and, you know, that last decades. Hey, you guys have, you know, rampant economic inequality. And on top of that, your democracy isn't that great. You know, we're not going to listen to you. You know, we're not going to join this rules-based international order that America has been leading since World War II. We would like a new form of international politics. So to give you a sense of like how far apart they were, they can't even agree on like how the world should run,

let alone their own disagreements between the two countries. And this is a problem when you're considering these are the two most important nations in the world, the two biggest economies, the largest by population China and the third largest by population, the United States. Two just huge players on the international stage. And if they can't even agree on how the world should run, in fact, that China may be trying to usher in a new global system, let's say, well, that is huge. And we found out because this was all being recorded, not only audio as everyone just heard, but video. Are these kinds of diplomatic meetings usually recorded and broadcast? So here's where I think there was a miscalculation on both sides.

So usually when you have these diplomatic meetings, there can be what's called the camera spray. Like at the beginning, right? Or the opening remarks where they both say pro forma things like, you know, we look forward to tense but constructive conversations. And then the cameras are ushered out of the room and then the real talks begin. Where the miscalculation, at least some experts I talked to, you know, where happened is the U.S., again, used that camera opportunity to kind of go forth and get over its skis and say, you know, pretty clearly what it didn't like about China. Uyghur Muslim concentration camps. Our intent is to be direct about our concerns, direct about our priorities, with the goal of a more clear-eyed relationship between our countries moving forward. Thank you for being here.

Giving the Chinese the opportunity to respond. And they did. The foreign minister, Wang Yi, said you don't welcome guests with sanctions, a reference to the blacklisting of 24 Chinese and Hong Kong officials in the hours before the meeting. I mean, there was an agreement that each, you know, there were sort of a two by two meetings that each member would give two minutes, four total. Well, just one member of the Chinese delegation, the top Chinese foreign affairs official, went on for roughly 18 minutes. And so that's what led to the other tense moment, which was as the cameras were

being ushered out of the room, you had Tony Blinken and Sullivan basically say, no, no, no, no, no, no, stay here, stay in the room. Hold on one second, please. And Blinken gave a rejoinder in which he was like, look, we get it. There are problems with America. But what we've done throughout our history is to confront those challenges openly, publicly, transparently, not trying to ignore them, not trying to pretend they don't exist, not trying to sweep them under a rug. And sometimes it's painful. Sometimes it's ugly. But each and every time we've come out stronger, better, more united as a country. And so this was like an open airing of grievances that you wouldn't normally see.

This kind of conversation would normally happen behind the scenes, but there was this plan to, for whatever reason, to air this all out in public. Where does it go from there? Well, then the cameras are ushered out of the room and they get down to talks. Now, senior administration officials told me and others that, look, these conversations behind the scenes were intense, but they were substantive and we got down to work and it was fine and we talked about all these issues. The way the wording of this is, like, you know, substantive, but tense and frank, is really diplomatic speak for, like, it got real, right? Like, it got real, right? Like it got

real, real behind the scenes. And that's normal. When countries are so far apart on stuff like this, usually the conversations get really, really rancorous behind the scenes. It is possible. It was totally cordial and professional, and I'm sure it was for most of it. But when you're talking about emotional issues, like when you have Tony Blinken saying openly that what the Chinese are doing towards the Uyghurs is genocide. I can't imagine that when that issue came up behind the scenes that it went pretty well. In fact, Blinken and Sullivan on Friday after the two days of meetings ended said, look. It's no surprise that when we raised those issues clearly and directly, we got a defensive response. But we were also able to have a very candid conversation

over these many hours on an expansive agenda. On Iran, on North Korea, on Afghanistan, on climate, our interests intersect. So it gives a sense of like where the U.S.-China relationship really is, where the Biden administration is going to confront and compete with China on those sort of human rights top level issues. But where there's areas of mutual interest, they might actually find a way to work together. What's the big takeaway from this meeting? Was it sort of a disaster? Was it a miscalculation? Was it a mistake to put all

these cameras in the room in Anchorage? Or was it productive in the end? Well, I want to separate two things. We have roughly an hour of tape that we had at the beginning of these conversations, and then we have many more hours of private conversations that we're all not privy to. The private conversations, as far as we know, at least from the American side, as they say, they were tense, but they were substantive. They got down to work. They handled their stuff, right? The public one, that's not where diplomacy is done.

That's theater. It always is theater. Usually it's pro forma, but in this case, I think there were audiences in mind. On the American side, we have Republicans who have been very critical of Biden, even before he became president, but are basically being weak on China. Joe Biden's entire career has been a gift to the Chinese Communist Party and to the calamity of errors that they've made. They made

so many errors, and it's been devastating for the American worker. So Biden's team is trying to go like, hey, Republicans, we're not soft on China. Look, we're lambasting them in public in our first sort of airing of grievances meeting. The Chinese, I feel, have an audience of one, which is President Xi Jinping. He is ushering in the more authoritarian system in China. He's trying to make China, if not the most powerful player in the world, at least number two, and really trying to dislodge the U.S. from the center of the global system. So, you know, Xi was certainly watching or, you know, got the readout and was like, good, my officials were really handing it to the Americans, like really giving it to them.

So I feel like we need to keep that in mind. That is the theater and that is the reasoning behind all this. One hopes that real diplomacy got done behind the scenes, but we should have no illusions. There are no real problems solved in Anchorage. It was just an opening meeting. Both sides are really clear about where they stand. And what we found is that they're just really far apart and there's anger about how far apart they are. The Biden administration is talking tough against China. Now, the question will be, will they follow up the tough words with some tough deeds?

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Alex, I think everyone in the world knows that the relationship between the United States and China is both deeply symbiotic and deeply problematic. What doesn't everyone know that they should know? Well, one expert of the U.S.-China relationship told me that this is the worst point that she's seen in roughly two decades. And that's because this is not like a new Cold War, right? A lot of people are throwing that around. There's major differences between the U.S. and Soviet Union and the U.S.-China relationship now. But this is a new era of superpower rivalry that we haven't seen. Ideologies of how future government should run about, you know, who's going to lead the global economy, about technological standards, which really matters. Like, what are the semiconductors that are going to be like in our smartphones and computers? Every expert really I talk to, while they may disagree about the extent to which the U.S. and China should compete, what they say is like, buckle up. This is going to be a long, long, long-term thing.

Like the U.S.-China relationship will dominate the general U.S. foreign policy landscape for many years, possibly decades. And it's been dominant for decades already. How much of the history of our relationship with China is important to sort of rehash here? I really do think it's important to understand that we're in a completely different environment. Like we're in the precipice of a completely new U.S.-China relationship. Really, since the Nixon era, when there was the opening to China, the vast bipartisan strategy towards Beijing was, you know, we're going to engage with China. As we look to the future, we must recognize that the government of the People's Republic of China and the government of the United States have had great differences.

We will have differences in the future. But what we must do is to find a way to see that we can have differences without being enemies in war. By adding China to the WTO, we strengthen the organization by further integrating China's 1.2 billion people and 1 trillion dollar economy into the world market network. This step represents great progress for China, the WTO, and the world trading system. Even though there was always a worry about China's rise, like, are they going to try to overtake America? There was still this hope that by, you know, doing trade deals, by offering economic incentives, by having American companies do business in China, right, having Chinese people like make stuff we've all seen

made in China and then sell to the American economy, that that would interlink the two countries and things would be better over time. Now, generally speaking, that was the bipartisan plan. All really from Nixon to Obama. That sounds incredible. But overall, that was actually like everyone sort of followed that general framework. Did this change under President Obama? years, there was hope for engagement, like the Paris Climate Accord and working on climate change, working on cyber standards, Afghanistan, really a myriad bunch of issues where Obama's theory was, look, I'm going to kick this engagement into overdrive. In fact, Xi Jinping, then China's vice president, came to America to hang out with then Vice President Joe Biden. Good morning. So how popular have the L.A. Clippers become? The vice president of China will visit Los Angeles later this week and ask for tickets to a Clippers game. Unfortunately, the team isn't in town, so he's got to settle for a Lakers game.

Oh, how times have changed. Well, the United States and China, as you pointed out, Mr. Vice President, will not always see eye to eye. It is, it is a sign of the strength and maturity of our relationship that we can be candid about our differences as we have been. That change in the latter half of the Obama administration because there was, you know, China hacking the Office of Personnel Management. They were still not allowing American companies to fairly compete in the Chinese market. There was still a dispute today about like, hey, MasterCard and Visa can't really do any business in China, which of course you'd want as a very populous nation. And so a lot of experts said like, look, this engagement strategy failed. Obama's administration, while

it did some good stuff with China, ultimately failed to change Chinese behavior and really help out America in terms of economic and security standards. And then President Obama's successor shows up. And it got worse. When China doesn't want to fix the problem in North Korea, we say, sorry, folks, you got to fix the problem because we can't continue to allow China to rape our country. And that's what they're doing. It's the greatest theft in the history of the world. We will distribute a vaccine. We will defeat the virus. We will end the pandemic. And we will enter a new era of unprecedented prosperity, cooperation, and peace. As we pursue this bright future, we must hold accountable the nation which unleashed this

plague onto the world, China. It was part of sort of Trump's general view that, you know, a lot of what was going wrong in the United States, particularly the decline of manufacturing, the decline of certain economic sectors was because of China's rise. And so he tried to correct that with a trade war that got, you know, billions of dollars, extremely rancorous. And there was also just the general antagonism towards China. And that ended that that ended the era of engagement. In fact, then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, speaking at the Nixon Presidential Library, said this. Look, we have to admit a hard truth. We must admit a hard truth that should guide us in the years and decades to come, that if we want to have a free 21st century and not the Chinese century of which

Xi Jinping dreams, the old paradigm of blind engagement with China simply won't get it done. We must not continue it and we must not return to it. President Obama's successor loved to boast about how tough he was on China. And I think to be fair to him, he seemed to be pretty tough on China, at least when it came to trade. He didn't seem particularly tough when it came to trade. He didn't seem particularly tough when it came to, say, the Uyghurs. Did he accomplish anything with all that toughness? A little bit. I mean, he did, through the Uyghur Human Rights Act, which he did sign, reluctantly, let's be real, but he signed it. It put, you know, China on notice and has made it

possible for, and easier for any administration to sanction Chinese officials using that act. In fact, it happened on Monday, today, where the Biden administration used that act signed by Trump to sanction two top Chinese officials for the treatment of the Uyghurs. But what I think, if we're looking for his sort of big accomplishment, did China change its policies? No, I think it was pretty feckless what he did overall, in part because he tried to do it all unilaterally. But his big success, and one that will be long lasting, is that he sort of changed the narrative in D.C. about what the U.S.-China relationship should be. It is now a bipartisan given that America should be tough on China. It is not just a Trump point. It's not just a Republican point.

Democrats buy it too. And it has informed the Biden administration as it was coming into office. So where does this leave President Biden? I mean, his administration's first meeting with Chinese diplomats didn't go completely as planned. But what is the broader ambition here? It's really twofold. Some would say threefold. But when you listen to Biden administration officials talk, they say, look, the Trump administration got sort of the general thrust right. We should compete with China like they give them credit for that. But the way they went about it was wrong. And Biden really has sort of two general critiques. The first is that, you know, you can't do it alone. The U.S. is powerful, there's no question, but if you're going to get China to change almost everything about its

domestic and foreign policies, you need partners and allies on board. This is sort of a multilateral push. In fact, one former Biden aide told me before the administration started that the goal was to create a democratic alliance to save the world. Part two is to revitalize and rejuvenate American society. This is the, like, foreign policy begins at home thing, right? That if you are going to say that democracy is good, then American democracy must be good. If you are going to say, hey, China, stop, like, hating other cultures, we have to support racial equality at home. So this is a competition. Let's be good. If you are going to say, hey, China, stop hating other cultures, we have to support racial equality at home. So this is a competition. Let's be clear. This is a competition for the fight of the global system, of sort of global values that the U.S. is trying

to lead with partners and allies and by changing its own society at home. How much of this conflict that has now landed at President Biden's doorstep is complicated by the fact that we're also dealing with this surge in violence against Asian Americans, this mass shooting in Georgia last week, elderly Asian people being attacked in the streets across the country, a sentiment that, you know, surely may have been fueled by President Obama's successor calling coronavirus things like the China flu. It's hard to know what the direct influence of Trump's rhetoric is, but it's hard to believe that it didn't have any influence. And it's hard to believe still, like we won't know if Biden's

combative stance towards China will lead to or fuel more anti-Asian hate in America. But it's possible that it will, because if the constant, you know, refrain coming out of the U.S. is like, it's the Chinese government, not Chinese people. But still, if it's constantly combative, it's about look what they're doing to Uyghurs, look what they're doing in Hong Kong, look what they're doing in Tibet, look at their aggressions around the world to our allies and partners. Then at least the conception is, oh, China, you know, China bad, Chinese people bad. And that, and, you know, mixed with a whole bunch of other factors,

it could just fuel anti-Asian hate. And that's a problem for Biden because he does want to compete with China. In fact, most experts say the U.S. should compete with China, but he also wants to stop the rise of anti-Asian hate. But we also have to consider this, that a lot of China's actions are also hurting millions of Chinese people.

So how do you call out China for its actions that are also hurting people in China, innocent people in China, without fueling hate here? It's hard. It's going to require deft messaging, and I'm sure that's what the Biden administration is working on right now. And beyond that very difficult task, there's the other one, presumably, which is preventing escalation. Yeah. I mean, let's be clear. Again, most experts say the competition, the confrontation is good, but we should remember that it's a theory, right? The theory is engagement didn't work. This new plan might work, but if it doesn't, then we have some really uncomfortable conversations to have in the United States.

What are we willing to defend? What are we willing to possibly use military force to signal and defend? If China were to invade Taiwan, do we defend it? It is a country we have great relations with. Do we enlist Japan and Korea or other nations? Does this become a bigger thing? That's probably the highest end of our worries, right? We're far away from that, like, you know, worst case scenarios.

But these do have to be in the back of our mind as we consider China's military is pretty strong. It does have nuclear weapons, not many, but it does. It could get worse. And most experts say

that's probably going to get worse before it gets better. And that's what I think we saw in Alaska, which was maybe someday in the future, down the line, there will be a diplomatic meeting that's probably going to get worse before it gets better. And that's what I think we saw in Alaska, which was maybe someday in the future, down the line, there will be a diplomatic meeting that we won't have that bombast and that blow up. But the symbolism of that meeting is it's bad. It's really bad.

And it's probably going to continue to be bad. And if we want it to get good, we really need to figure out how to handle China because we really haven't for 50 or so years. You can hear more from Alex Ward on the Worldly podcast from Vox. You can find it anywhere in the world on your preferred podcast application. Thank you. you