Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang, who assumed the post only two months ago, held his first annual press conference on Tuesday at the “Two Sessions” of China’s rubber-stamp legislature and policy advisory committee.
Qin’s speech was remarkably belligerent, threatening the United States with “catastrophic” consequences for “reckless” policies such as shooting down Chinese spy balloons and supporting Taiwan.
Qin was appointed on December 30. He replaced 69-year-old Wang Yi, who was promoted to the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party after ten years as foreign minister. Qin was China’s ambassador to the United States before his promotion, a post from which he denied the Uyghur genocide and made excuses for why China would not allow U.N. investigators to visit its concentration camps.
At 56, Qin is among the youngest foreign ministers to serve Communist China. He is highly active on social media, including Twitter, which is forbidden to ordinary Chinese citizens but enthusiastically employed by high officials to spread propaganda around the world. He is also a protege and hardcore loyalist of dictator Xi Jinping.
One of Qin’s early assignments as foreign minister was to conduct a “charm offensive” with American basketball fans, delivering a recorded Chinese New Year greeting to a game between the Washington Wizards and Orlando Magic in January. Qin styled himself as a fan of American sports during his year and a half as Chinese ambassador to the United States.
There was nothing charming or conciliatory about Qin’s press conference at the “Two Sessions” of the National People’s Congress (NPC) and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), a powerless but nominally influential policy board. Qin touted China’s deepening partnership with Russia and made overtures to European, Middle Eastern, and Asian powers, but he relentlessly blasted the Biden administration for allegedly causing all of the world’s problems and threatened reprisals for any further actions that ran against China’s imperial interests.
Qin was most belligerent on the subject of Taiwan, where he apparently thought quoting a few lines from the Communist “constitution” was enough to settle all questions about the fate of the island.
“Some senior U.S. officials have recently asserted that the Taiwan question is not an internal affair of China. We firmly oppose such absurd comments, and we will stay on high alert,” he said.
“The Taiwan question is the core of the core interests of China, the bedrock of the political foundation of China-U.S. relations, and the first red line that must not be crossed in China-U.S. relations. The U.S. has unshirkable responsibility for causing the Taiwan question,” he insisted.
“Mishandling of the Taiwan question will shake the very foundation of China-U.S. relations. If the United States truly expects a peaceful Taiwan Strait, it should stop containing China by exploiting the Taiwan question, return to the fundamental of the one-China principle, honor its political commitment to China, and unequivocally oppose and forestall Taiwan independence,” he demanded.
“Why does the U.S. talk at length about respecting sovereignty and territorial integrity on Ukraine, while disrespecting China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity on China’s Taiwan question?” he asked. “Why does the U.S. ask China not to provide weapons to Russia, while it keeps selling arms to Taiwan in violation of the August 17 Communique? Why does the US keep on professing the maintenance of regional peace and stability, while covertly formulating a “plan for the destruction of Taiwan?”
The August 17, 1982, communique Qin referred to was the product of negotiations between the Reagan administration, which was bound by the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act to sell defensive arms to Taiwan, and Communist China, which wanted to make Taiwan defenseless. The compromise reached in the communique was that U.S. arms sales to Taiwan would be limited, but not halted, and only if China maintained peaceful relations with Taiwan – an obligation Qin’s regime has clearly failed to meet during its years of relentless economic and diplomatic war against the administration of current President Tsai Ing-wen.
The weird “plan for the destruction of Taiwan” talking point Qin dropped into his remarks refers to China’s obsession with an American radio host named Garland Nixon claiming on Twitter last month that a “White House insider” heard President Joe Biden say, “wait until you see our plan for the destruction of Taiwan.”
Nixon later said his tweet was meant as “satire” – which should have been fairly obvious from the full quote, in which Biden supposedly bragged about making Ukraine into a disaster and promising to do worse with Taiwan – but China’s tightly-controlled social media went wild with it, frantically flinging the manufactured quote at the Taiwanese in a bid to convince them America is plotting to stab them in the back.
Qin railed against the United States for shooting down China’s spy balloon in February, calling it a “violation of the spirit of international law and international customary practices.” He further accused the U.S. of sabotaging China in a futile effort at “containment and suppression” of the rising authoritarian power.
“If the United States does not hit the brake but continues to speed down the wrong path, no amount of guardrails can prevent derailing, and there will surely be conflict and confrontation. Who will bear the catastrophic consequences?” he threatened.
Qin added that his threats were directed at the elected leaders of the United States, not the people who elected them.
“The American people, just like the Chinese people, are friendly, kind, and sincere, and want a better life and a better world,” he said soothingly.
Qin also hinted that a growing column of Chinese allies in American politics who are “deeply worried about the current state of China-U.S. relations” might be able to save the future by “calling for a rational and pragmatic policy toward China.”
“We hope the U.S. government will listen to the calls of the two peoples, rid of its strategic anxiety of ‘threat inflation,’ abandon the zero-sum Cold War mentality, and refuse to be hijacked by ‘political correctness,’” said Qin, indicating a somewhat tenuous grasp of what any of those political catchphrases mean.
Qin scoffed at U.S.-European-Asian efforts to compete with China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which he touted as a “high-quality public good initiated by China, built by the parties involved, and shared by the world,” rather than the “so-called debt trap” denounced by its critics. He blamed American interest rate hikes for making the “debt problems” in China’s BRI client states worse.
Qin howled at the free world’s answer to Chinese aggression in the South China Sea, ignoring the international court rulings that held Beijing’s expansive claims to be invalid and saying nothing about China’s thuggish tactics to push other Asian nations away from the islands it covets.
Instead, Qin insisted the U.S. is causing all of the tension in the South China Sea by “plotting an Asia-Pacific version of NATO” that would “encircle China.”
“As a pacesetter in global development, Asia should be a stage for win-win cooperation rather than a chessboard for geopolitical contest. No Cold War should be reignited, and no Ukraine-style crisis should be repeated in Asia,” he said, alluding to Russia’s mythology that its invasion of Ukraine was prompted by NATO expansionism.
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