US Commerce Secretary Arrives in Beijing as CCP Struggles to Save Its Economy

U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo (C) talks to U.S. Ambassador to China Nick Burns (R) as she arrives at the Beijing Capital International Airport in Beijing on Aug. 27, 2023. Andy Wong/Pool/AFP via Getty Images

U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo arrived in Beijing on Aug. 27, kicking off three days of talks with senior Chinese officials who are grappling with a faltering economy.

According to China’s state media, Ms. Raimondo was greeted by Li Feng, director general of China’s Commerce Ministry, and U.S. Ambassador Nick Burns at the Beijing Capital International Airport.

Ms. Raimondo is the fourth Biden cabinet official to visit Beijing in the past three months after Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, and climate envoy John Kerry.

Outside observers expect the communist regime to be more friendly with Ms. Raimondo than its previous U.S. guests, especially Mr. Blinken, who received a muted welcome in Beijing and had his biggest request—to resume the military hotline—rejected.

China is reaching out with warm messages for Ms. Raimondo as the regime wrestles with its faltering economy, Su Tzu-yun, a senior analyst at Taiwan’s government-funded Institute for National Defense and Security Research, told The Epoch Times, on Aug. 26 while the commerce chief was en route to Beijing.

“The stock market will continue to slump, the ticking time bomb in the property sector could explode at any time, [youth] unemployment is at a record high, and the foreign investors are leaving China,“ he said. “The internal economic situation is very unfavorable.”

But the ailing economy was “created by the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] itself,” Mr. Su noted.

Under CCP leader Xi Jinping, China updated its anti-espionage law, which broadens the definition of espionage to “all documents, data, materials, or items related to national security and interests.” The vaguely worded legislation, which doesn’t specify what falls under national security, brings more challenges to global businesses after several raids and arrests rattled investors.

The authorities have slapped Mintz, a U.S. due-diligence firm, with a $1.5 million fine in a security crackdown after police raided its Beijing office and detained five of its local employees in March.

The latest counterespionage push, which creates a more hostile social environment by encouraging citizens in China to spy on each other, combined with a top economic leadership team picked by Mr. Xi based on political loyalty instead of experience, is having “a fatal impact on China’s economic development,” Mr. Su said.

Facing the ailing economy, “China now wants the United States, as well as the European Union, to give a hand,” he said.

U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo steps from a plane as she arrives at the Beijing Capital International Airport in Beijing on Aug. 27, 2023. Andy Wong/Pool via Getty Images

Skepticism

Ahead of the trip, Ms. Raimondo’s department removed 27 Chinese entities from the “unverified list,” which restricts companies from receiving sensitive U.S. technology exports.

That move was welcomed by the Chinese regime.

“It shows that the two sides can address specific concerns through communication based on mutual respect,” Wang Wenbin, Beijing’s foreign ministry spokesperson, said at a daily briefing on Aug. 22.

Li Qiang, China’s new premier who oversees the economy, also offered an olive branch at a meeting with a visiting delegation of the U.S.–China Business Council in Beijing.

“China is willing to work with the U.S. in undertaking their responsibilities as major countries, jointly upholding international trade rules, and ensuring the stability of global industrial and supply chains,” Mr. Li said at the meeting on Aug. 21, according to the summary from CCP state media Xinhua.

Still, analysts doubt whether the Chinese regime would back up its expression of goodwill with any policy changes.

“I don’t think the Chinese Communist Party could make an effective response to the request of the United States,” Song Guo-cheng, a researcher at National Chengchi University’s Institute of International Relations in Taiwan, told The Epoch Times.

That skepticism, he said, springs from the Chinese regime’s failure to follow through on its promise of expanding the purchase of U.S. goods and services under the phase-one trade agreement signed in January 2020, making it impossible to set a timeline for a phase-two deal.

“The CCP hasn’t responded in any kind of good faith,” Mr. Song said. “That’s why the U.S–China trade war is not ending.”

A shipping container is offloaded from an East China Sea container ship at the Port of Oakland in California on June 20, 2018. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

While the Commerce Department stated that Ms. Raimondo is looking forward to “constructive discussions” with senior Chinese officials on issues related to bilateral commercial ties, challenges faced by U.S. businesses, and areas for potential cooperation, analysts see little hope for an end to spiraling U.S.–China tensions.

“I am very negative and pessimistic regarding the CCP,” Mr. Song said. “I don’t see any specific actions the CCP would like to take to ease the tension in the U.S.–China trade relations.”

US Feeds the CCP

U.S. former and current officials, meanwhile, warned that the Chinese regime has no intention of changing policies such as forced technology transfers and state subsidies that led to the current U.S. export controls.

Before Ms. Raimondo traveled to Beijing, House Select China Committee Chair Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), along with a group of fellow Republicans, urged her to tighten export controls on the CCP.

“The fact is that the Chinese Communist Party shouldn’t get any say in our decisions over export controls,” Mr. Gallagher told The Epoch Times. “We have legitimate national security concerns about American technology going to China to fuel its ongoing genocide“ in Xinjiang and to help perfect an ”Orwellian totalitarian surveillance state.”

Nazak Nikakhtar, a former senior U.S. Commerce Department official, said that the CCP has enacted a series of laws and mandates, such as national security laws and anti-foreign sanctions laws to force companies to comply with its demands to hand over their sensitive technologies.

“China’s a nonmarket economy. Its economy is not based on market fundamentals,” she said on Aug. 22 at a webinar held by the Committee on the Present Danger: China. “The CCP also decides how American businesses operating there are to operate. There are CCP members in every important business in China. They decide how the company runs.

“So, when we talk about export controls, tech transfer, let me be clear that China has no interest in following our rules or prohibitions.”

Decades of engagement with the CCP have allowed U.S. capital and technology to strengthen the communist regime.

With the help of technological theft and transfers from the United States, China now leads the world in 37 out of 44 technologies, including critical areas such as space, artificial intelligence (AI), and quantum technology, Ms. Nikakhtar said, citing a March report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

“This is very dangerous,” she said.

A television shows a news broadcast about China conducting a drill around Taiwan, at a local electrical repair store after Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi's (D-Calif.) visit to Taipei, Taiwan, on Aug. 4, 2022. Annabelle Chih/Getty Images

The advanced technology and money did little help to Chinese people. Instead, they facilitate the CCP to intensify the crackdown on its own people and advance its military, Ms. Nikakhtar said.

“China’s GDP is the second-highest in the world; the gross national income of an average worker is one of the lowest in the world. What does that mean?” she said.

“That means that everything we purchase from China, every time we allow China to grow and build bigger, our capital flows aren’t going to the workers, aren’t going to the companies, but [are] going directly into the pocket of the CCP that’s using our dollars to fund genocide and to fund [its military].”

Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon said it was the United States that allowed the CCP to seize power in 1949 and maintain control in 1989 after the regime sent tanks and troops to crush thousands of pro-democracy student protesters at Tiananmen Square in Beijing.

“Now, the only way they can survive is the American elite of Wall Street, [the] technology industry, in our political class, to bail him out a third time,” Mr. Bannon said.

“If we stand our ground now, they will collapse,” he said, because the Chinese people “will bring them down, and we'll actually have a free China.”

Luo Ya and Eva Fu contributed to this report.