US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen committed a string of diplomatic faux pas during her visit to Beijing Saturday, bowing to her Chinese counterpart multiple times without reciprocation — a protocol error that critics flagged as a sign of American weakness.
The Biden administration’s top economic official, on the second day of her four-day effort to mend fences with a major rival, bowed at least three times as she shook hands with Vice Premier He Lifeng, video shows — while He, Xi Jinping’s new economy czar, stood erect, backing away slightly to give the beaming Yellen more room to kowtow.
“Never, ever, ever,” Bradley Blakeman, a senior staffer in George W. Bush’s White House, told The Post. “An American official does not bow. It looks like she’s been summoned to the principal’s office, and that’s exactly the optics the Chinese love.”
“Bowing is not part of the accepted protocol,” agreed Jerome A. Cohen, an emeritus professor at NYU and expert in Chinese law and government.
Moments later, Yellen, 76, tripped over He’s name, calling him “Vice Premier Hu” as she opened the first official American meeting with the economic chief, a Xi loyalist who was named to the post in March.
“I strongly believe that the relationship between our two countries is rooted in the solid ties between the American and Chinese people,” Yellen said in her brief initial statement, running a finger along her lines as she spoke.“It is important that we keep nurturing and deepening these ties.”
Yellen tried to convince the world’s largest polluter to cut back on carbon emissions to curb climate change.
“We have a duty to both our own countries and to other countries to cooperate” on environmental issues, she said.
And she pleaded for the US and China to establish a “healthy economic competition that is not winner-take-all.”
“Where we have concerns about specific economic practices, we should and will communicate them directly,” she declared.
This week, just days before Yellen was set to arrive, China suddenly announced new export restrictions on gallium and germanium, two metals crucial for semiconductor manufacture – claiming the need to “safeguard national security and interests” in what was widely seen as a retaliatory move in the wake of American curbs on Chinese tech.
And soon after Yellen landed in Beijing, China rattled its sabers against Taiwan, sending 13 People’s Liberation Army aircraft and six vessels into the airspace and waters around the independent island democracy that the CCP claims as its own.
“The way to treat an adversary is, you don’t go hat in hand,” Blakeman said. “But with this administration, time and time again, we embarrass ourselves and show weakness. And it just shows the lack of effective leverage we have.”