China lashes out at US allies in bid to thwart Biden strategy

Bloomberg

This week Joe Biden made good on his campaign promise to work more with allies to pressure China, coordinating with US partners to impose sanctions over alleged human-rights abuses in Xinjiang.
Beijing’s response: Hit back at the allies as hard as possible.
China wasted no time immediately retaliating with reciprocal sanctions against European Union officials while summoning the bloc’s ambassador to China. Those hit included politicians in a range of countries, one of the main EU bodies formulating foreign policy and Europe’s largest research institute focused on China.
“It was very unfortunate that they went so deep into their toolbox,” said Joerg Wuttke, the Beijing-based president of the European Chamber of Commerce in China and a board member of the Mercator Institute of China Studies, one of the sanctioned entities. Noting that a landmark EU-China investment deal reached in December will likely be put on the back burner, Wuttke said China appeared to be treating the allies harsher than the US.
“Size matters,” he said. “They are more cautious about the US and they go full-on after Canada, Australia and the EU.”
China’s assertive response on the heels of a rare public dust-up with US officials in Alaska last week shows President Xi Jinping’s government is digging in against international criticism on what it considers “internal issues,” from Xinjiang and Hong Kong to Taiwan. Beijing’s stance risks drawing clearer lines between geopolitical blocs than occurred under Donald Trump, whose “America First” policy led to a damaging trade war but also allowed Beijing to make inroads with traditional US allies that felt alienated.
China this week reached out to two long-time friends, Russia and North Korea, both of which have also been on the receiving end of US sanctions in recent years. On Tuesday, Foreign Minister Wang Yi held talks with Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov on how to counter the hegemony of the US dollar by promoting the yuan and ruble.
“A few Western countries have staged a show to smear China, but they should know the days that they could interfere in China’s internal affairs by fabricating lies have long passed,” Wang said in the southern
Chinese province of Guangxi.
The pushback continued on Tuesday at the daily Foreign Ministry briefing in Beijing, where spokeswoman Hua Chunying declared Xinjiang a “successful human-rights story” while unleashing an unusually broad attack against the EU, Canada and the US, all of which put new sanctions on China this week.
On Monday diplomats from more than 20 countries also gathered outside a Beijing court where former Canadian diplomat Michael Kovrig was being tried on spy charges.
Hua’s critique spanned centuries, running the gamut from their role in the slave trade, imperialism and Nazism to the killing of George Floyd and alleged hoarding of coronavirus vaccines. She dismissed criticism from countries with “small populations” and mocked their coalition as “pseudo-multilateralism.”
“China today is by no means the old China of 120 years ago,” Hua said in an apparent reference to the agreement imperial powers forced China to sign after the Boxer Rebellion. “The US, the UK and other countries should not dream of making China surrender by exerting pressure. I’m afraid they don’t have the capability to strangle or throttle China.”
Beijing’s top diplomats set the tone for the latest rhetoric during the Alaska meetings with the US, when Politburo member Yang Jiechi made extended remarks attacking America’s human-rights record and questioning whether it represented international public opinion. Afterward, Chinese propaganda touted sales of T-shirts and mobile-phone cases emblazoned with phrases used at the talks, including “Stop interfering in China’s internal affairs” and “The US does not have the qualification to speak to us in a condescending manner.”
China’s strictly controlled social media on Tuesday was rife with nationalistic voices supporting the Chinese government’s retaliatory sanctions. Many echoed the official line that Western countries have no shortage of human-rights abuses and argued in support of the government’s policies in Xinjiang — where the United Nations estimates upwards of 1 million mostly ethnic Uyghurs are kept in internment camps.
Still, some voiced concerns for the impact on China’s ties with Europe, particularly the fate of the Comprehensive Agreement on Investment with the EU. “Is a new Cold War coming?” read one Weibo post that received over 6,000 likes. “Being besieged is not in China’s favor.”
China is likely to continue issuing reciprocal sanctions and strongly criticising coordinated statements even if it derails the EU investment deal, said Natasha Kassam, a former Australian diplomat who worked on human-rights issues in China and is now director of the Lowy Institute think-tank’s public opinion and foreign policy program.
“The logic in Xi Jinping’s China often prevents a rethink of counterproductive policy,” she said. “And Chinese officials appear to be prioritizing a show of strength over global public opinion.”