When Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen arrived in Beijing early this month for a four-day visit, her Chinese greeter at the airport pointed skyward to a rainbow as an apparently auspicious sign for a restart in the United States and China’s fraught relationship. Chinese premier Li Qiang later referenced the heavenly symbolism, saying, “After experiencing a round of winds and rains, we surely can see a rainbow.”
It was indeed a positive sign, since it seems the last time U.S. and Chinese officials were looking skyward and pointing, it was to gaze at a suspected Chinese spy balloon.
Ms. Yellen’s trip came just weeks after Secretary of State Antony Blinken made his first foray to China as America’s top diplomat. John F. Kerry, the Biden administration’s climate envoy, just completed a three-day visit. And next is a possible visit by Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo.
There have been other exchanges in between. Mr. Blinken on July 13 met with Chinese foreign policy chief Wang Yi in Jakarta, Indonesia, and in Washington, Chinese Ambassador Xie Feng met Ely Ratner, the U.S. assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific security affairs, to discuss the possibility of restarting military-to-military talks.
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End of carousel- D.C. Council reverses itself on school resource officers. Good.
- Virginia makes a mistake by pulling out of an election fraud detection group.
- Vietnam sentences another democracy activist.
- Biden has a new border plan.
The D.C. Council voted on Tuesday to stop pulling police officers out of schools, a big win for student safety. Parents and principals overwhelmingly support keeping school resource officers around because they help de-escalate violent situations. D.C. joins a growing number of jurisdictions, from Montgomery County, Md., to Denver, in reversing course after withdrawing officers from school grounds following George Floyd’s murder. Read our recent editorial on why D.C. needs SROs.
Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) just withdrew Virginia from a data-sharing consortium, ERIC, that made the commonwealth’s elections more secure, following Republicans in seven other states in falling prey to disinformation peddled by election deniers. Former GOP governor Robert F. McDonnell made Virginia a founding member of ERIC in 2012, and until recently conservatives touted the group as a tool to combat voter fraud. D.C. and Maryland plan to remain. Read our recent editorial on ERIC.
In Vietnam, a one-party state, democracy activist Tran Van Bang was sentenced on Friday to eight years in prison and three years probation for writing 39 Facebook posts. The court claimed he had defamed the state in his writings, according to Radio Free Asia. In the past six years, at least 60 bloggers and activists have been sentenced to between 4 and 15 years in prison under the law, Human Rights Watch found. Read more of the Editorial Board’s coverage on autocracy and Vietnam.
The Department of Homeland Security has provided details of a plan to prevent a migrant surge along the southern border. The administration would presumptively deny asylum to migrants who failed to seek it in a third country en route — unless they face “an extreme and imminent threat” of rape, kidnapping, torture or murder. Critics allege that this is akin to an illegal Trump-era policy. In fact, President Biden is acting lawfully in response to what was fast becoming an unmanageable flow at the border. Read our most recent editorial on the U.S. asylum system.
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So far, this flurry of talks has not led to any real breakthroughs, and most analysts are playing down expectations. Ms. Yellen, for example, reported only modest progress but called her talks with Chinese leaders a “step forward.” But even talks themselves are a good thing, because high-level, face-to-face communications had been largely frozen since last August, when then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) made her ill-timed trip to Taiwan. That’s almost a year, which is way too long.
Consider climate: Beijing, in a fit of pique over the Pelosi visit, cut off climate talks, meaning the world’s two largest economies (and its two largest polluters) had no direct high-level exchanges just as global temperatures reached their highest levels ever recorded. That is fiddling while the world burns. Even as Mr. Kerry wrapped up his visit this week, Chinese leader Xi Jinping declared China would make its own decisions on how to address climate change.
Still, bilateral talks are important for reopening channels of communication, understanding each other’s intentions, and not allowing misunderstandings to fester and lead to potentially disastrous consequences. That’s why reestablishing military-to-military contacts is crucial, with U.S. and Chinese forces operating in proximity in the waters of the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait.
Dialogue is also important for establishing a floor for when relations again spiral downward. And there will be more thorny issues ahead, with some coming relatively soon.
The United States is set to impose new export curbs on high-tech products to China, including quantum computing and semiconductor chips. A bill working its way through Congress could force the closure of three Hong Kong trade offices in Washington, New York and San Francisco, on the grounds that Hong Kong is no longer sufficiently autonomous from China, which imposed a harsh national security law on the territory in 2020. And the Biden administration will soon have to decide whether to grant an exception to allow Hong Kong’s sanctioned chief executive, John Lee, to travel to the United States in November to attend a summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation group.
Any of those decisions — or other unknowns — could again cause a rupture and increase tensions in the U.S.-China relationship. But the damage can be contained if officials can talk directly to each other, explain intentions clearly and make sure the loudest, most extreme voices don’t prevail. Breakthroughs might still come, with more hard work. But for now, let’s keep talking.