Chinese President Xi Jinping intends to prevent Taiwanese Vice President Lai Ching-te from “visiting the United States,” according to a top Chinese ambassador, who characterized the trip as a crisis in the making.
“The provocative, adventurist moves by Taiwan’s separatists should be contained,” Ambassador Xie Feng said Wednesday. “And now the priority for us is to stop [Lai Ching-te] from visiting the United States, which is like a gray rhino charging at us.”
Lai reportedly intends to travel to Paraguay by way of the United States next month, on the heels of Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen’s “transit” through New York and California in the spring. President Joe Biden’s team has signaled that the passage should unfold “without incident,” but the new envoy to the United States tried to rattle that confidence while also projecting a collegial posture in his debut before the national security community’s great and good of the Aspen Security Forum.
“We want to grow together with the United States … we should say goodbye to the Cold War mentality,” he said. “We should say goodbye to the zero-sum game, and we should avoid a major country conflict.”
Xie maintained a convivial tone throughout much of the conversation, yet he clammed up when Semafor founding editor Steve Clemons took word of Henry Kissinger’s visit to Beijing as an occasion to inquire about Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang, who “has not been seen in public for 23 days,” according to a BBC record of his schedule. Xie demurred, in the face of reminders that Qin appeared at Aspen last year.
“Well, the Foreign Ministry spokesman had already briefed the media on this news,” Xie said. “I thank you for your care.”
In this photo released by Xinhua News Agency, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, left, meets with the top diplomat of China’s Communist Party, Wang Yi, in Beijing, Wednesday, July 19, 2023. Amid a steep downturn in relations with the United States, China has looked to a meeting with former U.S. national security adviser and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to revive positive momentum. (Zhai Jianlan/Xinhua via AP)
Beijing has kept a tight lid on information about Qin’s status, even in the days since he missed a meeting with Secretary of State Antony Blinken on the sidelines of the ASEAN summit in Indonesia earlier this month. Chinese Foreign Ministry officials claimed that he skipped the ASEAN summit “because of health reasons,” and he was replaced by the Chinese Communist Party’s highest-ranking diplomat, Wang Yi.
“The Communist Party is far from transparent and typically does not release information in this kind of situation, and although he has been missing for three weeks, which is a long time, we can only speculate,” Royal United Services Institute associate fellow Sari Arho Havren told the South China Morning Post. “When it comes to China’s reputation and diplomacy, the case is considered an internal party affair, and I don’t think the Chinese authorities are really concerned about how this radiates, or looks, to the outside.”
Yet discomfort with the silence has appeared even within the Chinese state media ecosystem.
“There’s something everyone is talking about but can’t be talked about publicly,” former Global Times editor Hu Xijin wrote in recent days on social media, per a Bloomberg translation. “There needs to be a balance between keeping the operations running and respecting the public’s right to information. Disclosing information would help improve official credibility and convey confidence to the private sector.”
Chinese officials, for their part, touted Kissinger’s visit as a model for “how to bring [the U.S.-China] relationship back to the right track” after years of tensions.
“U.S. policies towards China require Kissinger-style diplomatic wisdom and Nixon-style political courage,” said Wang, who continues to fill in for Qin.
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Xie held out a similar hope but claimed that Taiwan, an island democracy that Beijing claims as sovereign territory, even though the Chinese Communist Party has never ruled in Taipei, is a threat to that optimistic outlook.
“Now the two imposing threats … is the Taiwan separatist advancing their separatist agenda, seeking U.S. support,” he said. “They even do not admit they are Chinese. So this is a very dangerous path they are taking. Second, is the United States playing the Taiwan card to contain China.”
