Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said that she told Chinese officials during her four-day trip to Beijing that the United States won’t allow its national security to be compromised.
However, Ms. Yellen didn’t meet with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, who met with Secretary of State Antony Blinken last month during his trip to China.
Like Mr. Blinken’s trip to China, Ms. Yellen’s trip didn’t result in any major breakthrough between the two countries.
“Xi Jinping has made his intentions clear. He wants China to replace America as the world’s superpower,” Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) wrote in a Twitter post on July 8. “Communist China is not our friend, and Biden needs to stop acting like they are.”
Unfair Trade Practices
Ms. Yellen said that she “pressed” the Chinese side about China’s unfair economic practices.“That includes the breadth and depth of China’s nonmarket policies, along with barriers to market access for foreign firms and issues involving intellectual property,” she said.
The Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property estimated in 2017 that the U.S. economy suffers an annual loss of $225 billion to $600 billion due to China’s intellectual property theft each year.
In March, William Evanina, founder and CEO of Evanina Goup, said during a hearing held by the House Judiciary Committee that the Chinese regime uses a “whole-of-society” approach to steal intellectual property.
“The Communist Party of China uses intelligence services, science and technology investments, academic collaboration, research partnerships, joint ventures, front companies, mergers and acquisitions, and outright theft, insider threats, and cyber intrusions,” Mr. Evanina said.
Beijing has also rolled out different talent recruitment programs, seeking to entice Chinese and foreign nationals in the technology and science sectors to work in China. Some applicants in these programs have been accused by U.S. prosecutors of stealing intellectual property and trade secrets.
Ms. Yellen said that she also expressed her concerns about “a recent uptick in coercive actions against American firms.”
Decoupling
Ms. Yellen reiterated that Washington isn’t seeking to decouple from China—a policy endorsed by some Republicans and experts—saying that doing so would be “disastrous for both countries and destabilizing for the world.”“There is an important distinction between decoupling, on the one hand, and on the other hand, diversifying critical supply chains or taking targeted national security actions,” she said, before adding that the United States would continue to take necessary “targeted actions” to protect its national interests and those of its allies.
Ms. Yellen later said that any potential outbound investment curbs from the U.S. side would be done “in a transparent way” and would be “clearly directed narrowly at a few sectors” where Washington has specific national security concerns.
“I want to allay their fears that we would do something that would have broad-based impacts on the Chinese economy. That’s not the case. That’s not the intention,” she said.
Feng Chongyi, a professor of China studies at the University of Technology Sydney, told The Epoch Times in an interview on July 9 that now isn’t the right time for Washington to decouple economically from Beijing due to high U.S. inflation and the Ukraine war.
“The U.S. doesn’t want its inflation to get worse,” Mr. Feng said, explaining that prices could rise if the two nations decouple.
A U.S. decision to decouple from China could lead to a change in Beijing’s stance on the Ukraine war, prompting the communist regime to fully back the Kremlin’s war efforts, he said.
In other words, Mr. Feng said, the ongoing high-level talks between China and the United States serve a “calming” purpose in preventing the CCP from supporting Russia with its personnel and military supplies.
As for Ms. Yellen, Mr. Feng explained that the Chinese regime sees her as someone who could help China.
‘Irreconcilable’ Ties
Despite the Biden administration’s efforts to fix the bilateral ties, outside observers believe the tensions are inevitable given that the ideological gulf between the United States and the communist regime in China plays a key role in driving the conflict.“China’s rise relied on the West, mostly through the West’s open economic policy,” said Sun Kuo-hsiang, a professor of international relations at Nanhua University in Taiwan.
While the West initially expected that the Chinese regime could transform itself into an open market through engagement, Mr. Sun said, “The CCP didn’t make any fundamental changes.”
Instead, the CCP turned its economy into a weapon, according to Tang Jingyuan, a U.S.-based China affairs commentator.
“With its economy developed, the CCP started to export its human rights abuses, unfair trade practices ... to the whole world,” Mr. Tang said. “These trends made many countries, especially the United States, feel the severe threats to their own national security,” thus forcing them to take action to protect their own interests.
“This is one factor that soured the U.S.–China relations.”
Another element is Taiwan, Mr. Tang said.
The regime has ramped up military threats against the democratically governed Taiwan by continuing to send warplanes near the island on a regular basis. In 2022, China sent 1,727 military aircraft into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone, up from 960 in 2021 and 380 in 2020, according to the island’s defense ministry.
“The CCP’s strong intention that it wants to use force to break the status quo of the Taiwan Strait, even the South and East China Seas, has triggered alarms” in the United States and other democratic countries, Mr. Tang said.
While Beijing and Washington agreed to continue communication, Mr. Tang sees their widening drift as irreconcilable.
“The [U.S.–China] conflict is about ideology after all,” he said.
“So it is irreconcilable.”
