U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo arrived in Beijing on Aug. 27, kicking off three days of talks with senior Chinese officials who are grappling with a faltering economy.
According to China’s state media, Ms. Raimondo was greeted by Li Feng, director general of China’s Commerce Ministry, and U.S. Ambassador Nick Burns at the Beijing Capital International Airport.
Ms. Raimondo is the fourth Biden cabinet official to visit Beijing in the past three months after Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, and climate envoy John Kerry.
China is reaching out with warm messages for Ms. Raimondo as the regime wrestles with its faltering economy, Su Tzu-yun, a senior analyst at Taiwan’s government-funded Institute for National Defense and Security Research, told The Epoch Times, on Aug. 26 while the commerce chief was en route to Beijing.
But the ailing economy was “created by the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] itself,” Mr. Su noted.
The authorities have slapped Mintz, a U.S. due-diligence firm, with a $1.5 million fine in a security crackdown after police raided its Beijing office and detained five of its local employees in March.
Facing the ailing economy, “China now wants the United States, as well as the European Union, to give a hand,” he said.
Skepticism
Ahead of the trip, Ms. Raimondo’s department removed 27 Chinese entities from the “unverified list,” which restricts companies from receiving sensitive U.S. technology exports.That move was welcomed by the Chinese regime.
“It shows that the two sides can address specific concerns through communication based on mutual respect,” Wang Wenbin, Beijing’s foreign ministry spokesperson, said at a daily briefing on Aug. 22.
Li Qiang, China’s new premier who oversees the economy, also offered an olive branch at a meeting with a visiting delegation of the U.S.–China Business Council in Beijing.
Still, analysts doubt whether the Chinese regime would back up its expression of goodwill with any policy changes.
“I don’t think the Chinese Communist Party could make an effective response to the request of the United States,” Song Guo-cheng, a researcher at National Chengchi University’s Institute of International Relations in Taiwan, told The Epoch Times.
“The CCP hasn’t responded in any kind of good faith,” Mr. Song said. “That’s why the U.S–China trade war is not ending.”
While the Commerce Department stated that Ms. Raimondo is looking forward to “constructive discussions” with senior Chinese officials on issues related to bilateral commercial ties, challenges faced by U.S. businesses, and areas for potential cooperation, analysts see little hope for an end to spiraling U.S.–China tensions.
US Feeds the CCP
U.S. former and current officials, meanwhile, warned that the Chinese regime has no intention of changing policies such as forced technology transfers and state subsidies that led to the current U.S. export controls.Nazak Nikakhtar, a former senior U.S. Commerce Department official, said that the CCP has enacted a series of laws and mandates, such as national security laws and anti-foreign sanctions laws to force companies to comply with its demands to hand over their sensitive technologies.
“So, when we talk about export controls, tech transfer, let me be clear that China has no interest in following our rules or prohibitions.”
Decades of engagement with the CCP have allowed U.S. capital and technology to strengthen the communist regime.
With the help of technological theft and transfers from the United States, China now leads the world in 37 out of 44 technologies, including critical areas such as space, artificial intelligence (AI), and quantum technology, Ms. Nikakhtar said, citing a March report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.
“This is very dangerous,” she said.
The advanced technology and money did little help to Chinese people. Instead, they facilitate the CCP to intensify the crackdown on its own people and advance its military, Ms. Nikakhtar said.
“China’s GDP is the second-highest in the world; the gross national income of an average worker is one of the lowest in the world. What does that mean?” she said.
“That means that everything we purchase from China, every time we allow China to grow and build bigger, our capital flows aren’t going to the workers, aren’t going to the companies, but [are] going directly into the pocket of the CCP that’s using our dollars to fund genocide and to fund [its military].”
Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon said it was the United States that allowed the CCP to seize power in 1949 and maintain control in 1989 after the regime sent tanks and troops to crush thousands of pro-democracy student protesters at Tiananmen Square in Beijing.
“Now, the only way they can survive is the American elite of Wall Street, [the] technology industry, in our political class, to bail him out a third time,” Mr. Bannon said.
“If we stand our ground now, they will collapse,” he said, because the Chinese people “will bring them down, and we'll actually have a free China.”
