There’s talk, and there’s productive talk. You would sometimes think U.S. officials are paid by the word and are content with the former.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen have recently visited China. Climate Czar John Kerry is currently visiting.
These visits and attendant dialogue are variously described as “candid and constructive,” “direct, substantive, and productive,” and vital to “maintain open channels of communications,” “responsibly manage competition,” “reduce risk of misperception and miscalculation,” and “to learn more about each other.”
And the subtext is that if the Americans stop talking, then war with China is just around the corner.
The idea seems to be that enough talking and the right words or incantations will bring Beijing to its senses. Exactly how isn’t clear. It’s not as if the Chinese don’t understand what the Americans are saying.
Maybe they’ll just get fed up with blabby Americans and concede? Or maybe it’s Blinken, Yellen, and Kerry’s sheer animal magnetism that is supposed to win over the Chinese communists? Add in a visit by Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to Beijing, and the magnetism will be overwhelming.
That said, suggest to our foreign policy elite and even our military top brass that talking for talking’s sake is unproductive, and you’ll get eye-rolling ridicule.
However, we’ve been talking nonstop to communist China for 30-plus years.
How well is dialogue and engagement working to modify Chinese behavior?
You can make your own scorecard.
- Back off of Taiwan. Stop military harassment and intimidation, and let Taiwan into international organizations.
- Back off of Japan. Lay off the Senkakus, and no more hints that Okinawa and the Ryukyu Islands are Chinese. Stop demonizing the Japanese.
- Back off the Philippines—and recognize the 2016 Permanent Court of Arbitration ruling that repudiated CCP claims to the South China Sea. Stay out of Philippine maritime territory.
- End cyber attacks on the United States.
- Stop stealing intellectual property from U.S. companies. And no longer demand handing over sensitive technology as the price of foreign companies’ admission to the China market.
- Allow foreign companies to conduct “due diligence” in China.
- End the requirement for Communist Party cells in foreign companies operating in China.
- Open the concentration camps and also stop eradicating Uyghur culture.
- End organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience, religionists, and dissidents—or anyone else.
- Allow religious groups to operate freely.
- Free Jimmy Lai and other Hong Kong freedom advocates and live up to the terms of the 1984 Hong Kong handover agreement.
- Stop fentanyl exports from China (that killed 70,000 Americans last year alone).
- Change the tone of public discourse so the Chinese media and official spokesmen no longer exhibit nonstop contempt and vitriol toward the United States.
- Enforce sanctions on North Korea (that Beijing has already agreed to) and stop interfering with aircraft and ships enforcing the sanctions.
- Rein in the Chinese fishing fleet—so it follows the rules rather than vacuuming the oceans—in the high seas and others’ territory.
- Stop interfering with U.S. military operations in the South China Sea and Taiwan Strait.
- Make the yuan or RMB (Chinese currency) freely convertible—like Beijing promised to do years ago and more than once.
- Pull Chinese intelligence collection assets out of Cuba.
- Cooperate in an open inquiry into determining the origin of COVID-19.
- Close Chinese overseas “service centers” or “police stations,” and stop intimidating the overseas Chinese diaspora.
- Stop taking hostages, and release the ones Beijing is holding.
Don’t get your hopes up, however.
Everything described above that needs improvement happened during the previous 30-plus years of talking, engagement, and accommodation of the CCP that was supposed to moderate communist Chinese behavior and turn it into a “responsible stakeholder.”
One could rightly be skeptical that more talking will improve things.
Dialogue and diplomacy are not the same thing. One observer recently described dialogue as being to diplomacy what “hyper-inflation is to money.”
Talk when you have something to talk about and you are in a position to defend and enforce your interests.
The American statesman George Shultz aptly said, “Negotiations are a euphemism for capitulation if the shadow of power is not cast across the bargaining table.”
Mr. Shultz is gone, but one can imagine what he would have said about talking for talking’s sake.
He might have agreed with an astute scholar of diplomatic history who recently noted that “diplomacy is not psycho-babble or social work.”
We’ve been talking to China for a long time. Without results, for us, at least. But China has done quite well.
Putting it in baseball terms, the United States is batting .000.
Meanwhile, the Chinese are batting about .950—having tolerated U.S. dialoguing over the past 50 years while using U.S., Western, and Japanese investment and market access in the democracies to turn a dirt-poor nation into a superpower aiming for global domination.
The only exception was the Trump administration—in which certain officials who understood China were finally putting some wood on the ball—despite fierce opposition from the engagers and the “don’t provoke China” crowd inside and outside the administration.
But in 2021, they were sent to the showers, and a team of .000 hitters replaced them in the lineup.
So the next time you hear that talk and more talk is good, get out the above list and see whether China is doing anything differently.
