WASHINGTON – President Biden tried to downplay growing public concern over his administration’s floundering relations with China Thursday, telling reporters it amounted to “hysteria.”
“I think that, and I’ve said this for some time, that the hysteria that the relationship with China ‘is collapsing and moving, etc., etc.,'” he said, trailing off before he finished his thought at a joint press conference with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Biden later doubled down on his opinion that US-China relations were in fine shape – despite drawing the ire of Beijing by characterizing Chinese President Xi Jinping as a “dictator” in remarks to Democratic donors Tuesday.
“The idea of my choosing and avoiding saying what I think is fact with regard to the relationship with China is not something that I’m going to change very much,” Biden said.
The president went on to reference Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s weekend trip to Beijing to meet with senior Chinese officials, including Xi, as proof that fears of a conflict are overblown.
“Secretary Blinken had a great trip to China,” he said. “I expect to be meeting with President Xi sometime in the future, in the near term – and I don’t think [the ‘dictator’ remark] had any real consequence,” he said.
But the Blinken trip accomplished little, with America’s top diplomat failing to resolve one of the more pressing national security concerns when it comes to China: a restart of military-to-military communications.
Beijing has not picked up the phone for the Pentagon since August, when then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi became the highest-ranking US official to visit Taiwan since the 1990s.
Though Biden is apparently nonchalant about the state of relations with America’s No. 1 adversary, the fraying ties with Beijing are of high concern in the Pentagon, which regularly urges China to restore communications to avoid misunderstandings that could lead to military conflict.
Earlier this month, Beijing snubbed Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s request to meet with Chinese Defense Minister Li Shangfu on the sidelines of the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore.
While the two briefly shook hands for cameras at the Pacific security summit on June 2, the two “did not have a substantive exchange,” Pentagon Press Secretary Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder said at the time.
“The Department believes strongly in the importance of maintaining open lines of military-to-military communication between Washington and Beijing to ensure that competition does not veer into conflict,” Ryder said after Li snubbed Austin.
The impact of the lack of communications on international incidents became obvious in early February when a Chinese spy balloon traversed US airspace from Alaska to South Carolina.
Immediately after the US military shot down the object on Biden’s orders, Austin attempted to call then-Chinese Minister of National Defense Wei Fenghe to explain the situation. Beijing refused to allow the military officials to speak.
“We had an incident that caused some confusion, you might say,” Biden said Thursday, minimizing the the balloon ordeal and appearing to adopt the line that the Chinese craft entered US airspace accidentally, a bizarre reversal from earlier White House opinions that the balloon was specifically sent to spy on sensitive US military sites from high above.
