WASHINGTON - Communication between the United States and China has been at a low ebb in recent months, said US Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns on Tuesday, as he called on both governments to establish more reliable and consistent channels of communication with each other.
“We had a pretty good pattern of communication until the balloon incident. And that coincided with a public disagreement between us on the issue of Chinese assistance to Russia for Russia’s illegal war in Ukraine,” Mr Burns said, at a talk organised by Washington-based think-tank The Stimson Centre.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken cancelled his scheduled trip to China in February amid a diplomatic firestorm, after a Chinese balloon was spotted flying over the US and shot down.
China denied US accusations that the balloon was part of an espionage programme. The US shot down three other balloon-like objects that month, although no others were linked to China.
Washington and Beijing have also not had a productive discussion on the trade of fentanyl – the deadly drug behind the spike in deaths in America’s opioid epidemic – which Washington has blamed Chinese chemical firms for fuelling, although talks on climate cooperation are back on, said Mr Burns.
“What we really need is a more broad-based engagement at the Cabinet level, and the United States is ready for that. So we hope that the government here (in Beijing) will be ready as well,” he said via video link.
He added: “It’s hard for me to predict at this point when this kind of re-engagement will reoccur, but we have never supported an icing of this relationship.”
The high-level disconnect between the two superpowers comes amid what the ambassador called an unhealthy decoupling of their societies over the past few years.
It is not in America’s national interest that too few American students are travelling to China or learning Mandarin, said Mr Burns, who assumed his post in April 2022.
“It’s not healthy. It’s not smart,” he said. “We do want to see students travel back and forth. We ought to want to see young Americans learning Mandarin... so that if they go into business or government, they can understand in a sophisticated way the other power in the world in the 2030s, the 2040s.”
While there are about 295,000 Chinese students in the US, there are only 350 US students in China, compared with the thousands that were there a decade ago, Mr Burns noted.
The stark difference was due to Beijing’s strict zero-Covid policy, which meant students could not get visas to enter the country, he said.
The ambassador said he hoped that business travel and student exchanges would pick up again, with China having reopened its borders.
However, while foreign firms were staying in China because of its huge market, many were delaying investments until they could see some consistency in Beijing’s messaging about the openness of its economy, he said.
Washington is also asking Beijing for a much broader, more aggressive effort by the Chinese government to treat US businesses equally.
“I’m hearing a consistent message from American businesses. They need a level playing field here. And they often don’t get it because of intellectual property rights violations or subsidies to Chinese competitors of these American firms,” he added.
