Virtual meeting

The U.S.-China journo, nukes and drug problem

By PHELIM KINE

U.S. President Joe Biden participates in a virtual meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Roosevelt Room of the White House November 15, 2021 in Washington, DC. President Biden met with his Chinese counterpart to discuss bilateral issues. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images) | Alex Wong/Getty Images

Hi, China Watchers. This week we peek under the hood at six months of progress — or lack of — in areas of bilateral cooperation since President Joe Biden’s Nov. 15 virtual meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping. We’ll also parse China’s Pacific Island climate diplomacy, probe a narrative-bashing Xinhua interview with Ukraine’s foreign minister and profile a book that documents Hong Kong’s untold history of defiance to outsider rule. Got a book to recommend? Tell me about it at pkine@politico.com.

Let’s get to it. — Phelim

In the aftermath of President JOE BIDEN and Chinese leader XI JINPING's Nov. 15 virtual meeting, administration officials revealed several new cooperation initiatives, backtracking on earlier assertions that the meeting would not produce specific deliverables.

The initiatives included an agreement on lifting restrictions on work visas for U.S. and Chinese journalists, closer collaboration on counternarcotics activities and bilateral talks regarding U.S. concerns about the rapid growth in China’s nuclear arsenal.

Six months later, bilateral distrust that threatens Secretary of State ANTONY BLINKEN’s conception of a U.S.-China relationship that is “collaborative when it can be” has stalled those goals. That will likely reinforce the administration’s hard-edge approach to Beijing embodied in the new China strategy that Blinken will unveil in a speech later this month.

“As the political struggles between Washington and Beijing intensify, it almost becomes a norm in China to interpret every American policy move in the worst possible way,” said TONG ZHAO, senior fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie–Tsinghua Center for Global Policy in Beijing. “The Chinese criticism against goodwill American gestures could work to discourage the United States from undertaking similar unilateral self-restraint measures, making it hard for any constructive interaction to get started.”

The limited progress in addressing these issues is clearly a sensitive issue for the administration. China Watcher sought unsuccessfully to get comment from the White House, the National Security Council, the State Department and the Office of National Drug Control Policy.

Journos in limbo. The clearest deliverable after the Biden-Xi call was an agreement to ease restrictions on journalists’ visas. The agreement, which Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson ZHAO LIJIAN praised as “worth cherishing,” aimed to end a standoff sparked in March 2020 when China expelled reporters for The Washington Post, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Beijing was apparently responding to a Trump administration move to slash the number of U.S.-based staff of Chinese state media organizations.

But six months later, many U.S. and Chinese journalists remain trapped in visa-issuance limbo. “I know that some visas have been granted for U.S. correspondents to return to Beijing … [but] it looks like baby steps, and I don't know if more visas have been granted for Chinese to come here,” said STEVEN BUTLER, Asia program coordinator at the nonprofit Committee to Protect Journalists.

Those U.S. journalists who have received work visas for China are encountering lengthy delays in acquiring PU invitation letters, an extra bureaucratic hurdle for business travelers imposed by China’s “zero-Covid” strategy, that are required for entry to the country, a person familiar with the matter told China Watcher.

The Chinese government says the Biden administration isn’t honoring the deal. “We are unequivocally opposed to discriminatory practice on the U.S. side against Chinese media in the U.S.,” said LIU PENGYU, spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Washington. “It is hoped that the U.S. can honor its words, put relevant measures and policies in place as soon as possible, and work with China to create a favorable environment for the work and life of journalists in each other’s country.”

Counternarcotics blame game. National security adviser JAKE SULLIVAN hinted at a Brookings Institution event on Nov. 16 that Biden and Xi had agreed on renewed counternarcotics cooperation.

That’s sorely needed. The synthetic opioid fentanyl, a drug approved for pain treatment, killed more than 64,000 Americans from April 2020 to April 2021, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A recent Stanford-Lancet study warned that the U.S. synthetic opioid overdose death toll could rise to 1.2 million by 2029. “Fentanyl is killing Americans at an unprecedented rate,” ANNE MILGRAM, Drug Enforcement Administration administrator, warned last month.

The Biden administration’s National Drug Control Strategy released last month identifies China as the source of “a significant volume of non-fentanyl opioids and precursor chemicals to produce fentanyl, fentanyl analogues and other synthetic drugs.” The strategy calls for the administration to “continue engagement with the PRC” to stop the flow.

That’s not happening. Successful bilateral cooperation in combating the fentanyl flow peaked in May 2019 when Xi responded to U.S. pressure by making all forms of fentanyl subject to production controls and anti-trafficking measures. It prompted a drastic reduction in direct shipments of fentanyl and related compounds from China.

“China had been expecting that in return it would get significant changes to the U.S.-China bilateral relationship — a lessening of the trade war during the Trump administration, and a much warmer relationship not defined as rivalry and competition from the Biden administration,” said VANDA FELBAB-BROWN, senior fellow in the Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology at the Brookings Institution. “It didn't and so [China] has backtracked very significantly from cooperation and the relationship on drugs has been very, very tense.”

China has blamed wider U.S.-China tensions — particularly those linked to U.S. allegations of genocide against Muslim Uyghurs in Xinjiang — for roiling bilateral counternarcotics efforts. Beijing is furious that the Department of Commerce placed China’s Ministry of Public Security’s Institute of Forensic Science on a sanctions list for alleged ties to human rights abuses. And the Chinese government interprets the U.S. opioid overdose epidemic as a domestic demand-side issue unconnected to China.

“The US should see fault in itself … and take practical and effective measures to reduce the demand for drugs,” said Liu of the Chinese embassy. “The last thing it should do is to constantly shift the blame and make accusations against other countries … it should immediately correct its mistakes, instead of asking for China’s cooperation on the one hand and sanctioning Chinese counter-narcotics bodies on the other.”

Nuclear standoff. The Biden-Xi virtual meeting also produced an agreement for bilateral talks about the rapid growth in China’s nuclear arsenal and its recent development of a hypersonic missile system.

The administration started walking back that initiative within days. A National Security Council spokesperson downgraded it on Nov. 17 to “conversations with empowered interlocutors.” Two days later, KURT CAMPBELL, National Security Council Indo-Pacific Coordinator, characterized those efforts as “the very early stages" of discussions on nuclear weapons and other security issues.

QIN GANG, Chinese ambassador to the U.S., rejected the prospect of U.S.-China nuclear negotiations in December and insisted the U.S. “take the prime responsibility to axe its nuclear arsenal” during a media briefing. That remains a precondition for U.S.-China talks on nuclear weapons. The U.S. should “verifiably slash its nuclear stockpile in a verifiable, irreversible and legally binding way to create conditions for other countries to join the nuclear disarmament process,” Liu told China Watcher.

The Chinese messaging comes straight from the top.

“Mr. Xi appears to be sticking to his long-standing view that China needs a stronger strategic military capability in the face of perceived U.S. hostility,” said Carnegie–Tsinghua Center’s Zhao. “The Ukraine war has only worked to reinforce this perception. This means China believes it is time to further strengthen its nuclear forces rather than to restrain its growth.”