Beware China bearing ‘working groups’
Tom Rogan
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President Xi Jinping of China seems happy with the outcome of Secretary of State Antony Blinken‘s trip to Beijing. Xi described his discussions with Blinken as having produced “agreements” of a “very good” nature. It is unclear what, specifically, Xi is referring to.
While it’s positive that the U.S. and China are again engaging in high-level talks, it would be a mistake to exaggerate what Blinken has accomplished.
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As I noted earlier on Monday, Xi refused Blinken’s request to establish a military hotline that could be used to lessen the risk of miscalculations. That refusal indicates that Xi may view his escalating military brinkmanship towards the U.S. military as useful leverage via which to extract concessions from Washington in other areas.
Another challenge is that Beijing likes to use its vague flirtation of possible cooperation as submissions that Washington should be grateful for. As the Washington Examiner’s Jerry Dunleavy reports, for example, Blinken pushed Beijing for “much greater cooperation” on stemming the flow of Chinese-manufactured fentanyl precursors into the U.S. Rather than commit to greater cooperation on this humanitarian interest, however, China is hedging. Blinken underlined as much when he noted only that “We agreed to explore setting up a working group or joint effort so that we can shut off the flow of precursor chemicals which help fuel this crisis and a growing number of deaths.”
“Agreed to explore setting up a working group” is very different from what actual progress might look like here. Something along the lines of “We agreed to set up a working group with an urgent view to taking new enforcement actions,” for example.
To borrow from Virgil’s famous warning on the Trojan Horse, “Timeo danaos et dona ferentes” (“I fear the Greeks even when bearing gifts”).
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Whether it’s climate change, military-to-military deconfliction, the war in Ukraine, trade, espionage, or any other concern, Beijing views cooperation on any one issue only as a transactional subset of broader engagement. From China’s perspective, if the U.S. wants any serious progress in cooperation to reduce fentanyl trafficking, Washington will have to make significant concessions in other areas. Beijing sometimes advertises its shameless transactional mentality. We saw this with the threat by Beijing’s Global Times state newspaper last month that China would suspend cooperation with the European Union on the war in Ukraine if the EU sanctioned Chinese businesses. That threat utterly contradicted China’s oft-stated claim that it wants to help end the war in Ukraine as a matter of shared international interest.
Top line: the U.S. must be willing to exert its own pressure on Beijing if it is to have any chance of breaking Xi from his reflexive belief that “win-win” cooperation always means Beijing winning twice as much as the U.S.