China is making “attempts to influence and arguably interfere” in the 2024 elections in the United States, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said during a diplomatic tour to the communist country.
“We have seen, generally speaking, evidence of attempts to influence and arguably interfere, and we want to make sure that that’s cut off as quickly as possible,” Blinken told CNN during a stop in Beijing. “Any interference by China in our election is something that we’re looking very carefully at and is totally unacceptable to us, so I wanted to make sure that they heard that message again.”
That protest was just one factor in a range of fraught issues as Blinken met with his counterpart and Chinese President Xi Jinping amid disputes over China’s enabling of Russia’s war in Ukraine and U.S. support for the Philippines against Beijing’s assertion of sovereignty over the South China Sea. Yet Chinese officials adopted a remonstrative tone, maintaining that the U.S. has “unreasonably suppressed” China’s rise.
“This is a fundamental issue that must be addressed, just like the first button of a shirt that must be put right, in order for the China-U.S. relationship to truly stabilize, improve, and move forward,” Xi told Blinken.
China has emerged as “the pacing challenge” for the U.S. over the last decade, when Beijing’s construction of artificial islands in the South China Sea emerged as a portent of tensions over China’s ambitions as it gained economic clout. China’s attempt to claim sovereignty over most of the South China Sea has fueled tensions with the U.S. and its allies in the region, while Chinese companies have equipped Moscow’s defense industry and joined Russia in conducting “information operations” against the U.S.
“They also have relatively similar narratives that they’re focused on — so also about undermining democracy, also about sort of denigrating U.S. leadership, and so on,” Avril Haines, the U.S. director of national intelligence, said Wednesday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “But they are more focused than Russia is, for example, in promoting what they see as pro-China policies and pro-sort of the CCP, the [Chinese] Communist Party, efforts and so on in their space.”
The anger over Beijing’s response to the coronavirus pandemic sharpened international perceptions of China as a threat, spurring U.S. efforts to mitigate dependence on exports from China and limit the communist regime’s access to high-end Western technology, even as Xi moved to backstop Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
“China is the top supplier of machine tools, microelectronics, nitrocellulose — which is critical to making munitions and rocket propellants and other dual-use items that Moscow is using to ramp up its defense industrial base,” Blinken told reporters Friday. “Russia would struggle to sustain its assault on Ukraine without China’s support.”
As Blinken met with senior leaders in Beijing, China’s defense minister huddled with Russian and Iranian officials on the sidelines of a Shanghai Cooperation Organization meeting in Astana, Kazakhstan.
“Iran and China’s defense chiefs discussed ways to enhance military cooperation, also conferring on regional issues,” reported PressTV, an Iranian state media outlet. “It is necessary for Iran and China to boost cooperation and convergence to solve security issues In the region and across the world, the Iranian defense chief said.”
The dialogue between China and Iran could dovetail with Tehran’s provision of weapons to Russia. In parallel, U.S. officials seek to nurture a “lattice” style network of relationships between their allies in the Indo-Pacific region, where Japan and other U.S. allies have a growing misgiving about the potential for aggression from China.
“Freedom of navigation and commerce in these waterways is not only critical to the Philippines but to the U.S. and to every other nation in the Indo-Pacific and indeed around the world,” Blinken said. “That’s why so many nations have expressed concern about the [People’s Republic of China’s] maritime maneuvers.”
Chinese officials rebuffed Blinken’s complaints. “If the U.S. keeps seeing China as its primary rival, the relationship will keep running into difficulties and challenges,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said Friday. “It is hypocritical and highly irresponsible for the United States to falsely accuse China over our normal trade and economic exchanges with Russia while passing legislation to provide massive aid to Ukraine.
Blinken, for his part, implied that the U.S. could impose a range of sanctions if China continues to equip Russia’s war machine.
“At the very same time that they’re trying to develop better relations with Europe, they can’t be doing that while at the same time helping to fuel what is the biggest threat to Europe’s security since the end of the Cold War,” he told NPR’s Steve Inskeep. “You’ve already seen us take action against more than a hundred Chinese entities with sanctions, applying export controls. There are other measures that we’re fully prepared to take. And as I said before, if China won’t act, we will.”
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Chinese officials, on the other hand, made an apparent effort to deter such measures by implying that they might derail U.S.-China relations.
“Overall, the China-U.S. relationship is beginning to stabilize. … But at the same time, the negative factors in the relationship is still increasing and building and the relationship is facing all kinds of disruptions,” Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told Blinken. “Should our two sides lead international cooperation against global issues and achieve win-win for all or engage in rivalry and confrontation or even slide into conflict, which would be a lose-lose for all? The international community is waiting for our answer.”