China needs ‘sense of crisis’ to balance US, Russia ties, brother of top Xi Jinping aide says
- Yang
Jiemian, who helped older brother Yang Jiechi coin one of Xi’s
favourite foreign policy catchphrases, defends China’s hawkish stance on
the US
- While
describing Russia’s turn towards China as a major shift, Yang warns
Beijing against complacency and exaggerating the US-Europe divide
23 Dec, 2021
China should make better use of the US factor in its burgeoning ties with Moscow while maintaining “a sense of crisis” about the limits of its own influence, a senior Beijing adviser has said.
In an interview published on state-controlled news portal The Paper, Yang Jiemian, former president of the Shanghai Institute of International Studies, defended China’s hawkish stance on the US. However, he cautioned about a possible deterioration in Beijing’s ties with Europe in the coming months.
Yang, better known as the younger brother of Yang Jiechi, President Xi Jinping’s top foreign policy aide, admitted that, despite warming political and economic ties, China and Russia did not always see eye to eye.
“Of course there are problems. Even brothers will have their own problems, not to mention [Russia] is our neighbour,” he said, citing differences on historical issues and energy cooperation.
“It is also clear that China and Russia are not exactly in the same position on specific foreign policy issues. But we need to bear in mind that those are a secondary aspect of Sino-Russian ties,” he said.
Yang, who helped his brother coin one of Xi’s favourite catchphrases – a “new type of major power relations”, is seen as an influential figure in China’s diplomatic establishment. His assertion last year that the Covid-19 pandemic had sped up an inevitable shift in the global balance of power in China’s favour was widely shared among officials and think tanks.
While Yang described Russia’s turn towards the East, especially China, as “a qualitative change” in President Vladimir Putin’s diplomacy, he said Beijing must remain on the alert.
“We cannot afford to completely abandon the sense of crisis. [Communist Party] General Secretary Xi Jinping said we cannot make subversive mistakes on key issues. The same goes for Sino-Russian relations,” the website quoted him as saying without elaborating further.
He also stressed the importance of Europe in China’s diplomatic strategy, describing the European Union as one of the four pillars of global affairs, along with China, Russia and the US.
But Yang drew attention to the change of guard in Germany, cautioning that – despite the lingering influence of Angela Merkel, new German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s China-friendly predecessor – “it would be unrealistic to expect Sino-German relations to remain the same.”
Yang also warned against exaggerating the divide between the US and its European allies, or the EU’s determination to emphasise its autonomy on foreign policy issues.
“Europe is an ally of the US and they share similar ideals and objectives. They have differences, but only up to a point,” he said.
Yang has previously said that Beijing should use the US factor to strengthen ties with Russia as well as other possible partners in Europe and Asia.
In another article published last month on the website of his Shanghai-based think tank, Yang cautioned that Beijing should take into account Russia’s vigilance towards China’s expansion of its influence in Eurasia, and remain alert about Washington’s attempts to split China and Russia and expand its Indo-Pacific strategy.
Russia and Eurasia would become more strategically significant for China if tensions with the US in the South and East China Seas, and the Taiwan Strait continued to rise, Yang argued.
Despite growing criticism over China’s handling of US ties, especially its lack of flexibility and a tit-for-tat approach that many say has accelerated the decoupling of the world’s top two economies, Yang believes Beijing has done well for itself.
He summed up China’s US strategy as being “confrontational where it must be and collaborative when it can be”, largely similar to what US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said about Washington’s approach towards Beijing.
“Sino-US ties have ended the steep decline since the era of [former president Donald] Trump and achieved a phased relaxation in the long-term strategic game between China and the US,” Yang said, referring to the first virtual summit between Xi and Joe Biden last month.
But “the ball is still in the US court”, he noted, as he urged the Biden administration to reverse its containment policy, and overcome the political divide and Cold War mentality at home to help bring bilateral ties back on track.
Another noted scholar at a government-linked think tank in Beijing painted a bleak picture of future relations with the US.
Yuan Peng, president of the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, said choosing China as an enemy would be “the biggest mistake in US grand strategy”.
“Biden has repeatedly declared that the US is not engaged in a ‘new cold war’ with China, but China still feels the chills all the time,” Yuan wrote in Communist Party flagship newspaper Guangming Daily, citing Washington’s confrontational approach on Taiwan, human rights and geopolitics.
Former Chinese ambassador to Washington Cui Tiankai has also warned
that “the US will inevitably try every possible means and spare no
effort, even without a bottom line, to suppress, contain, divide and
besiege China.”