Chinese officials were fired up during a recent in-person meeting with representatives from the Biden administration, who did not back down from the communist party's "bitter denunciations."
Anchorage, Alaska saw the meeting of two world powers in a hostile exchange on Friday, during which the Chinese defended themselves against U.S.'s accusations of human rights abuses and economic coercion.
The meeting was attended by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, and China's foreign minister and state councilor Wang Yi and Senior Chinese foreign policy official Yang Jiechi. The Alaska meeting allowed for the United States to formally confront China about their human rights violations, specifically in Xinjiang, where Uyghurs have reportedly been enslaved and abused since at least 2017.
According to Radio Free Asia, Blinken criticized China's actions in Tibet, Hong Kong, and Xinjiang, arguing that these abuses "threaten the rules-based order that maintains global stability."
Yang answered that China refuses to "accept unwarranted accusations from the U.S. There is no way to strangle China." He told Blinken that the U.S. should "change its own image and to stop advancing its own democracy in the rest of the world" because he believes many Americans "actually have little confidence in the democracy of the United States."
The Epoch Times reported that during the Alaska spat, Wang expressed his disapproval of the United States' sanctioning of up to 24 Chinese officials after their actions in Beijing that threatened their citizen's freedoms. Yang argued that the U.S. "does not have the qualification to say that it wants to speak to China from a position of strength."
Following the Alaska confrontation, China's state-controlled media unsurprisingly reported that the communist party had the upper hand in the discussion. Wang He, a Chinese political affairs commentator, warned that "CCP is more cunning and evil than most people can imagine" and that their threats must not be taken lightly.
Communist China also reasserted through their local media that their actions in Tibet, Hong Kong, and Taiwan are "untouchable red lines" that the United States should not involve themselves with.
U.S.-based China expert and the author Gordon Chang took to Twitter to share his thoughts on the recent Alaska spat. He wrote that after the meeting, "There is no longer any point talking to China's regime. Beijing told us in no uncertain terms that we must accept its barbarism, aggression, and criminality."
The Biden administration, however, understands that the Chinese Communist Party's aggression during the Alaska spat may have been all for show and was aimed at a domestic audience. There was, after all, national pride on full display from both camps.
"The tougher they appear, the more popular they will be, and the more they will be able to stoke feelings of so-called national pride at home, both within CCP ranks and outside the party," international relations scholar Zhang Yong explained to Radio Free Asia. Political scholars believe that the Alaska spat is just the beginning of a new era of the strained U.S.-China relationship, going as far as to label it a "new cold war."
