Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said there’s a way for the US to both compete and work with China as she prepares to meet with the Communist country’s economic czar in San Francisco this week.
“As a foundation, our two nations have an obligation to establish resilient lines of open communication and to prevent our disagreements from spiraling into conflict,” Yellen penned in an editorial for the Washington Post published Monday in a lead-up to the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit, slated for next week.
Yellen reaffirmed that the US and China need to “further stabilize the relationship and make progress on key issues,” especially considering that the two nations collectively “represent 40% of the global economy.”
“A constructive economic relationship can not only serve as a stabilizing force for the overall relationship but also benefit workers and families in both countries and beyond,” she wrote in the op-ed.
The Biden administration’s top economic official insisted she also plans to “speak to my counterpart about our serious concerns with Beijing’s unfair economic practices, including its large-scale use of non-market tools, its barriers to market access and its coercive actions against US firms in China.”
“In certain sectors, these unfair practices have resulted in the overconcentration of the production of critical goods inside China,” Yellen added of the Asian country, which manufactures a slew of seemingly all-American brands, including Levi Strauss & Co. denim, a host of Apple products and even baseballs used by the MLB.
A senior US Treasury official, however, has downplayed the idea that Yellen and Lifeng’s two-day meeting would have specific “deliverables,” saying it was not a “policy trade” situation “where we trade one thing for another.”
But the official said a key aim for Yellen was gaining a better understanding of how the new US-China economic communication line will work, and how to make sure that “it is not vulnerable to shocks,” adding that there will be more frequent interactions.
The San Francisco meetings, set for Thursday and Friday, will take before the Biden administration hosts ministers and leaders of APEC countries from Nov. 11 to Nov. 17 — a gathering during which President Joe Biden is aiming to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
A brief statement from a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson said only that He would visit the US from Nov. 8-12 at Yellen’s invitation, describing him as China’s “lead person for China-U.S. economic and trade affairs.”
It provided no details of any meetings.
Yellen, 77, first met with He in July when she visited Beijing to try to stabilize a deteriorating US-China relationship amid growing US restrictions on sensitive technologies.
The Treasury Secretary’s efforts were overshadowed by a string of diplomatic faux pas, including when she bowed to her Chinese counterpart multiple times without reciprocation — a protocol error that critics flagged as a sign of American weakness.
“Never, ever, ever,” Bradley Blakeman, a senior staffer in George W. Bush’s White House, told The Post at the time. “An American official does not bow. It looks like she’s been summoned to the principal’s office, and that’s exactly the optics the Chinese love.”
“Bowing is not part of the accepted protocol,” agreed Jerome A. Cohen, an emeritus professor at NYU and expert in Chinese law and government.
Moments later, Yellen tripped over He’s name, calling him “Vice Premier Hu” as she opened the first official American meeting with the economic chief, a Xi loyalist who was named to the post in March.
However, US-China communications thus far have helped American officials to explain national security policies to counterparts in Beijing, including on export controls on sensitive technologies that could have military uses and restrictions on outbound US investment to China.
But Yellen said her engagement with He was not meant to reconstitute the broad, Obama-era US-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue, which was widely criticized for its ineffectiveness.
Instead, Yellen said she was “focusing on specific, high-priority economic topics on which we can make tangible progress.”
Among these are cooperating on global challenges such as tackling climate change, speeding debt relief to poor countries and reducing illicit financial flows that support terrorism and the illegal drug trade.
With Post wires.
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