The Chinese Foreign Ministry announced Wednesday that dictator Xi Jinping has accepted U.S. President Joe Biden’s invitation to attend a virtual climate summit on Thursday, April 22, which Western environmental activists commemorate as Earth Day.
China’s state-run Global Times hailed Biden’s invitation as a “move sending positive signals for the China-U.S. relationship, which is currently facing growing tensions on a number of questions like Xinjiang, Hong Kong and Taiwan, and also a move in line with China’s fundamental position on bilateral ties in seeking cooperation amid divergences.”
The Global Times anticipated the summit will give Xi an opportunity to set Biden straight on China’s new role as the leading world power on all issues, including “climate change,” even as China runs wild building carbon-spewing coal-fired power plants across the Third World:
China’s attendance signals that cooperation between China and the US is still the mainstream tone. Also, the agenda of the global fight against climate change should not be decided by the US, and it is necessary for China to present its solutions for other countries to evaluate which are the best for their own interests, Li Haidong, a professor at the Institute of International Relations of the China Foreign Affairs University, told the Global Times on Wednesday.
“The attendance of our leader can also reassure other countries, as the world anxiously needs a strong voice on this issue,” Li said.
As a major channel for China and the US to resume high-level talks, cooperation on the climate issue is being anticipated by officials and scholars, especially after US climate envoy John Kerry became the first senior official to visit China since Biden took office. However, Chinese experts said earlier that China is not and will not be the “attendant” of a US-centered climate campaign, as it has its own agenda and roadmap in pursuing climate change goals.
The Global Times noted Russian President Vladimir Putin will also attend the summit, and expected him to likewise teach Biden that America can no longer “dominate the show.”
This rolled into another iteration of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) running argument that only authoritarian states like China can tackle major issues like climate change or the coronavirus pandemic, because democracies are helplessly divided by partisan bickering and Big Business corruption.
“Biden focused policies around new energy firms that supported him, but the country’s traditional energy industry is in a strong position. Conflicts among domestic interest groups will hinder the U.S. in making changes. The nature of U.S. election politics also determined that U.S. strategy and policies are not consistent. This uncertainty led to inconsistency and the world cannot believe in the U.S.,” Wang Yiwei of Renmin University’s European studies department told the Global Times.
Another Global Times editorial slammed U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken for daring to suggest the U.S. needs to “lead the renewable energy revolution” if it expects to win “the long-term strategic competition with China,” sneering that Blinken’s effort to pick a fight instead of joining Beijing in harmonious global cooperation “reflects U.S. anxiety toward China on the climate issue.”
Once again, the Chinese Communist paper claimed Chinese fascism is inherently superior to democratic capitalism for tackling global issues, as “China has the edge over the US in terms of lowering the costs of renewable energy R&D, manufacturing capacity and high-tech development” because “Chinese firms reacted positively to the country’s carbon neutrality goal.”
“Unlike China which has a consistent and smooth system for implementing orders from above, the U.S. ambition to push forward a green energy revolution may be watered down by partisan divide,” Lu Xiang of the Chinese Academy in Social Sciences in Beijing said.
“Blinken’s speech connotes a signal that at some point, if it finds it difficult to joust with China in this field, the U.S. may again wield the weapon of sanctions to target our green economy sectors,” Lu predicted.