This week, Joe Biden fulfilled his campaign promise to work more with allies to put pressure on China, coordinating with US partners to impose sanctions for alleged human rights abuses in Xinjiang.
Beijing’s answer: hit the allies as hard as possible.
China wasted no time on Monday night, immediately taking revenge with each other sanctions against European Union officials while calling the bloc’s ambassador to China. These victims included politicians from a number of countries, one of the EU’s main foreign policy bodies and Europe’s largest China-focused research institute.
“It was very unfortunate that they went so deep into the instrument box,” said Joerg Wuttke, chairman of the European Chamber of Commerce in China and a board member of the Merchant Institute of China Studies, one of the sanctioned entities. Noting that an EU-China benchmark investment deal in December is likely to be put on hold, Wuttke said China appears to be treating allies harder than the US
“Size matters,” he said. “They are more cautious about the United States and continue after Canada, Australia and the European Union.”
China’s assertive response to a rare public outcry from US officials in Alaska shows last week that President Xi Jinping’s government is investigating international criticism of what it considers “internal problems” from Xinjiang and Hong Kong to Taiwan. Beijing’s position risks drawing clearer lines between geopolitical blocs than those held under Donald Trump, whose “America First” policy led to a damaging trade war, but also allowed Beijing to get in the way. with traditional allies FELT alienated.
‘Only the beginning’
“This could be just the beginning,” said Bates Gill, a professor of Asia-Pacific security studies at Macquarie University in Australia.
“Both sides, China on the one hand and other advanced democracies, usually liberal on the other, will test the other to see how much pain they can tolerate,” he added. “There are many more decouples that can happen and we should expect them to, especially in the areas of high-tech trade, investment and access to capital markets.”
The United States, Britain and the EU are sanctioning China for human rights abuses
China this week contacted two longtime friends, Russia and North Korea, both of whom have also been at the end of US sanctions in recent years. On Tuesday, Foreign Minister Wang Yi held talks with his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov on how to combat the hegemony of the US dollar by promoting the yuan and the ruble.
“Spurge China”
“Several Western countries have staged a show to smear China, but they should know the days when they could interfere in China’s domestic affairs by fabricating lies are long gone,” Wang said in southern China’s Guangxi Province.
The rejection continued on Tuesday afternoon at the Beijing Foreign Ministry’s daily briefing, where spokeswoman Hua Chunying called Xinjiang “a human rights success story,” while launching an unusually broad attack on The EU, Canada and the US are all imposing new sanctions on China this week. On Monday, diplomats from more than 20 countries also gathered in front of a court in Beijing, where former Canadian diplomat Michael Kovrig was on trial on espionage charges.
“Coordinated Western action is a symbolic victory for Joe Biden,” Nick Marro, a global trade analyst in Hong Kong for the Economist Intelligence Unit, said. “There seems to be more appetite for a coordinated overall approach among Western governments.”
China facing the Show of Unity Western at Canadian Trial
Hua’s criticism has spread over the centuries, from their role in the slave trade, imperialism and Nazism to the assassination of George Floyd and the alleged accumulation of coronavirus vaccines. She rejected criticism from “small populations” and mocked her coalition as “pseudo-multilateralism.”
“Today’s China is by no means the old China of 120 years ago,” Hua said in an apparent reference to the agreement the imperial powers forced China to sign after the boxer rebellion. “The United States, Britain and other countries should not dream of making China surrender under pressure. I’m afraid they don’t have the ability to strangle or crush China. ”
Beijing’s top diplomats set the tone for the latest rhetoric during Alaska’s meetings with the United States, when politician’s member Yang Jiechi made extensive remarks attacking America’s human rights history and wondering if it represented international public opinion. Subsequently, Chinese propaganda promoted the sale of T-shirts and mobile phone cases accompanied by phrases used in discussions, including “Stop interfering in China’s domestic affairs” and “The US is not qualified to speak to us in a condescending way.” ”
The social network strictly controlled by China was full of nationalist voices on Tuesday in support of the Chinese government’s retaliatory sanctions. Many rewarded the official line that Western countries have no lack of human rights abuses and argued in support of government policies in Xinjiang – where the United Nations estimates that more than 1 million mostly ethnic Uighurs are held in internment camps.
However, some expressed concern about the impact on China’s ties with Europe, in particular the fate of the Comprehensive Investment Agreement with the EU. “Is a new cold war coming?” read a Weibo post that received over 6,000 reviews. “Being besieged is not in China’s favor.”
China will continue to impose mutual sanctions and strongly criticize coordinated statements, even if it disturbs the EU investment agreement, said Natasha Kassam, a former Australian diplomat who has worked on human rights issues in China and is now the director of the EU think tank. Lowy Institute public opinion and foreign policy program.
“Xi Jinping’s Chinese logic often prevents a rethinking of counterproductive policy,” she said. “Chinese officials also seem to be prioritizing a show of force over global public opinion.”
– With the assistance of Iain Marlow, Philip Glamann, Colum Murphy, Jing Li and Lucille Liu
(Updates with comments from Nick Marro.)