https://www.newsweek.com/bidens-reset-communist-china-beckons-opinion-157663
Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan are set to meet with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) counterparts Wang Yi and Yang Jiechi today in Anchorage, Alaska, in what some have speculated is an effort to “reset” relations between the two powers.
The Biden administration has played down this idea—having vacillated previously on its desire for a “reset”—while China has indicated that it welcomes bilateral relations, on its terms.
But the truth of the matter is that by dint of having any such meeting, Team Biden is signaling that a reset is already well underway.
That the administration seeks to engage China without preconditions—and, further, from a position of relative weakness when it has professed it will only do so from strength—validates the view that the executive branch is reverting from a posture of hostility to one of accommodation. This holds regardless of whatever “tough talk” administration officials will likely say they communicated in the aftermath of the meeting.
China has done nothing in the early days of the Biden administration to merit this powwow. Therefore, it is proper to view the Alaska exchange as a de facto reward for the CCP’s continued malign behavior. The CCP continues to persecute Xinjiang’s Uyhurs, crack down on Hong Kongers and threaten the Taiwanese. With respect to its dealings with the West, the CCP has continued its coronavirus cover-up by obstructing the efforts of those investigating the origins of the pandemic that it unleashed upon the world.
In spite of this malign behavior, while it has tsk-tsked China over its human rights abuses and expressed muted criticism over China’s stonewalling of the World Health Organization (WHO) in its pandemic “investigation,” among the Biden administration’s first acts was to rejoin the WHO.
Does the fact it legitimized this CCP-captured organization, becoming party to it again without it having made any discernible reforms, indicate the administration is engaging from a position of strength?