US Secretary of State Antony Blinken recently delivered a speech at Asia Society outlining the US administration’s approach to China. With carefully calibrated language in his speech, he went to great length to spread disinformation, play up the so-called “China threat”, interfere in China’s internal affairs and smear China’s domestic and foreign policy.
The speech is imbued with typical pretentious preach and self-contradiction. I would not cover every single points here, but rather name some misleading falsehoods that could disorient some people unfamiliar with US customary discourses.
Falsehood 1: “Our diplomacy is based on partnership and respect for each other’s interests, while China practices coercive diplomacy against other countries and retaliates recklessly. Our task is to prove once again that all countries will be free to chart their own paths without coercion.”
Fact Check: China never engages in coercive diplomacy and firmly opposes coercive diplomacy by other countries. China never threatens other countries with force, never creates military alliance, never exports ideology, never meddles in others’ domestic affairs, never seeks a trade war, and never imposes unjustified oppression on foreign enterprises. Over the past 17 years since the resumption of diplomatic ties, China and Grenada have developed their bilateral relationship on the basis of mutual respect and equality. As an old Chinese saying goes, “a couple bound together by force cannot last long”, threatening other countries in any formers, either economically or militarily, is not China’s choice. In 1971, American scholar Alexander George first put forward the concept of “coercive diplomacy” to summarize the US policy toward Laos, Cuba and Vietnam at that time. The US government forced the military government of Haiti to step down in 1994, and referred to that as “a textbook example of coercive diplomacy”. In 2003, it explicitly characterized 30.3 billion US dollars additional military expenses for “coercive diplomacy” as incurred expenses. Latest example of “coercive diplomacy”, just ask the US, “on whose authority can it forbid Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua from participating the American Summit in 2022?”
Falsehood 2: The US remains committed to its “one China” policy, which is guided by the Taiwan Relations Act, the three Joint Communiques, the Six Assurances. Its policy on Taiwan has not changed.
Fact Check: The one-China principle is an established norm of international relations and a universal consensus of the international community. The United Nations considers “Taiwan” as a province of China with no separate status, the “authorities” in “Taipei” are not considered to enjoy any form of governmental status, and the US has made commitments to China regarding the one-China principle in the three China-US joint communiqués. However, for the past decades, he US has acted faithlessly, kept regressing from its own commitments and the consensus it reached with China, and attempted to weaken and undermine the one-China principle and use Taiwan to contain China by adding prefixes to the expression of its one-China policy, upgrading the level of engagement with local authorities and selling weapons at a larger scale and with enhanced capability. This is a major threat to peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait and is sternly opposed by China. The one-China principle must not be challenged, and the red line that no one should pursue a policy of “two Chinas” or “one China, one Taiwan” must not be crossed.
Falsehood 3: The US will give countries an alternative choice, so that they can be free from opaque investments that leave them in debt.
Fact Check: In providing foreign assistance, China always respects the sovereignty of recipient countries, attaches no strings whatsoever and pursues win-win outcomes. Chinese assistance has delivered real benefits to the relevant developing countries and received their acclaim and appreciation. The so-called Chinese “debt trap” is a narrative trap that the US and some other Western countries use to defame and smear China and disrupt China’s cooperation with other developing countries.
Let us take Africa as an example. The truth is that, Western capital constitutes the largest creditor of developing countries instead of China. According to the 2022 statistics of the World Bank, nearly three-quarters of the debt of Africa’s outstanding external debt is owed to multilateral financial institutions and commercial creditors mainly composed of Western financial institutions. China holds 17 percent of Africa’s overall external debt, far less than that of the West. Even the China Africa Research Initiative (CARI) at Johns Hopkins University of the US admitted that they found no evidence that China deliberately pushes poor countries into debt as a way of seizing their assets or gaining a greater say in their internal affairs. Professor Samita Hattige, adviser to the National Education Commission of Sri Lanka, said in an interview that Chinese loans are based on the needs of the Sri Lankan government and for the purpose of improving Sri Lankan infrastructure. The loans have brought major changes to Sri Lanka’s economy and people’s livelihood, and there is no such thing as a “debt trap”. China’s share in Sri Lanka’s external debt is around a mere 10 percent. Apparently, some media have chosen to ignore this fact. While the “Chinese debt trap” hyped up by Western media seems apprehensible at a glance, it has deliberately evaded the huge economic values that infrastructure improvement has created, such as economic development and more jobs and investment.
Falsehood 4: Climate is not about ideology. It’s about math. If China sticks with its current plan and does not peak its emissions until 2030, then the rest of the world must go to zero by 2035. And that’s simply not possible.
Fact Check: Developed countries, due to their unconstrained emissions over more than two centuries of industrialization, bear undeniable historical responsibilities for climate change. From a historical perspective, developing countries, including China, are not the primary emitters of greenhouse gases (GHG), but the victims of climate change. The principle of common but differentiated responsibilities is the cornerstone of global climate governance. It would be both inappropriate and unfair to apply the same restrictions on developed and developing countries.
Nevertheless, China, as a responsible major country, is fully aware of the ramification of climate change and has adopted serious measures to tackle it. President Xi Jinping committed explicitly that China will strive to peak CO2 emissions before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality before 2060. That means China will move from carbon peak to neutrality in only 30 years, 2.4, 1.4 and 1.2 times faster than the EU, the US and Japan respectively. China has made notable contribution to the global efforts in energy conservation, energy efficiency, renewable energy, transport and building, which are all in the range of 30% to 50%.
On the contrary, the US is the world’s largest GHG emitter in cumulative terms, and its per capita carbon emissions are 3.3 times that of the global average. In the 270 years from 1750 to 2019, the US emission of GHG accounted for about 1/4 of the global total, the world’s largest cumulative emissions, which are almost twice that of China’s. Despite its status as a major manufacturing nation, China’s current per capita carbon emissions are not even half that of the US, and its per capita cumulative emissions are only around 1/8 that of the US. Addressing climate change requires global cooperation, but not shunning responsibilities.
In recent years, some people in the US have suffered from “Sinophobia”. They stick to “Cold War Mentality”, see China as a “strategic competitor” and refuse to accept China’s development. In fact, China's overriding task is to concentrate on developing itself and meet its people's aspirations for a better life, rather than taking the place of any other nation. If the US keeps defining its relations with China in terms of major power competition and sets its policy goal as "I-win-you-lose", it will only push China and the US into confrontation and conflict and the world into division and turmoil. As the second largest economy in the world and one of the permanent members of the UN Security Council, China is a builder of world peace, a contributor to global development and an upholder of international order. China stands ready to work with all peace-loving countries to continuously make contributions to the common prosperity of humankind.