U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan arrived in Beijing, China, on Tuesday for in-depth conversations with top Chinese diplomats that communist state media have hinted would focus on strong-arming Sullivan into accepting a “correct understanding” of his host’s interests – and helping advancing.
China’s state-run Xinhua News Agency confirmed on Tuesday at press time that Sullivan landed in Beijing and immediately began talks with Foreign Minister Wang Yi.
As of Tuesday morning Eastern Time, the two reportedly “held a new round of China-U.S. strategic communication,” the first of several expected on the trip. It offered no details on the topics of conversation at press time.
Welcome to Beijing National Security Advisor @JakeSullivan46 pic.twitter.com/hN33dqWvkE
— Ambassador Nicholas Burns (@USAmbChina) August 27, 2024
This visit is Sullivan’s first in his position to China, though he has served as a sidekick to Secretary of State Antony Blinken in high-level China talks on several occasions. Sullivan was memorably present during the disastrous 2021 summit in Anchorage, Alaska, in which Wang Yi and top Politburo official Yang Jiechi lectured the American officials on “Black Lives Matter” and racism while receiving no similar condemnation for the ongoing genocide of majority-Muslim Uyghurs in occupied East Turkistan. The summit was so embarrassing for the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden that Chinese e-commerce stores began selling phone cases, tote bags, and other memorability with quotes from the summit printed on them to celebrate.
Sullivan has also engaged more recently with Wang directly. According to the White House, Sullivan and Wang have met privately five times, and four times over the last year and a half alone. None of the meetings have resulted in any significant differences in the American relationship with China, or any reduction in China’s harmful behaviors, from human rights abuses to intellectual property theft to its colonization of the South China Sea.
Sullivan is expected to stay in China from Tuesday through Thursday and spend hours discussing policy with Wang, who returned to the foreign minister position after the disappearance of predecessor and successor Qin Gang in 2023. He has also since taken up the Politburo position of the Yang Jiechi after the latter’s retirement.
An unnamed Biden “senior administration official,” briefing reporters on August 23, suggested that Wang and Sullivan could engage in conversations lasting as much as 12 hours.
“Each time the two have met, they have typically spent about 10 to 12 hours over two days covering bilateral issues, global regional issues, and cross-Strait issues,” the anonymous official said. “We expect to follow the same format in Beijing next week.”
The official listed the topics on the table as including “China’s support for Russia’s defense industrial base, [and] the South China Sea,” as well as China’s relationship with North Korea and its increasingly influential and malignant role in the war between Israel and the genocidal terrorist organization Hamas. The official also said the two would discuss China’s role in the international fentanyl trade and artificial intelligence. The person did not mention any discussion of China’s atrocious human rights record, particularly the Uyghur genocide, and emphasized that the visit was “really is about clearing up misperceptions and avoiding this competition from veering into conflict.”
China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi (R) and US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan (L) pose for photos before talks at Yanqi Lake in Beijing on August 27, 2024. (NG HAN GUAN/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
“Our China policy is not about changing China at its core,” the official emphasized.
The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in a briefing on the meeting on Sunday, hinted that Wang would approach his conversation with Sullivan much more aggressively.
“The Chinese side will focus on raising serious concerns, articulating its position and laying out serious demands on issues related to the Taiwan question, the right to development and China’s strategic security,” a senior North America official at the Foreign Ministry declared. “The United States has kept containing and suppressing China. And China has taken resolute countermeasures. The China-U.S. relationship is still at a critical juncture of being stabilized.”
The official described China’s false claims over the nation of Taiwan as a “red line that must not be crossed.” The United States, since the administration of former President Jimmy Carter, does not formally acknowledge the reality of Taiwanese statehood, but the existence of any contact at all between Washington and the democratic Taiwanese government outrages Beijing.
“The U.S. side’s continuous arbitrary measures against China in the areas of tariffs, export control, investment review and unilateral sanctions seriously undermine China’s legitimate rights and interests,” the Foreign Ministry official railed. “China demands that the U.S. side stop turning economic and trade issues into political and security issues.”
China’s state-run Global Times, which often serves as a less diplomatic regime mouthpiece than the Foreign Ministry, insisted in its coverage of Sullivan’s arrival that the Communist Party’s objective in welcoming the national security adviser would be to dispel “confusion and disruption caused by incorrect positioning and understanding of China.”
“The US needs to fundamentally change its perception of China and its strategic positioning toward China,” the outlet insisted, later adding, “Sullivan, first of all, needs to ‘know how to listen’ if he wants to achieve good results for the strategic communication in China.”
“For Sullivan’s first visit to China, truly listening to and understanding Beijing’s words, and making a proper contribution to establishing the correct understanding between China and the US, should be one of the standards to evaluate the success of his visit to China,” the newspaper concluded.