While Chinese President Xi Jinping stayed put during the pandemic he was backed up by his Foreign Minister Wang Yi who in a bid to spread Xi’s praises has been travelling extensively to Pacific island nations, Central Asia and often Africa.
However, the case in point is Wang’s hidden agenda in his globetrotting — to denigrate the US during his visits. This is apart from Wang’s primary purpose of extolling Beijing’s vision for the world, reported New York Times.
Wang Yi’s travel schedule during the pandemic was ruthless as he travelled to over 30 countries so far this year. This included places big and small. All this with an aim to campaign for his boss Xi Jinping’s global ambitions.
One of the most eminent messages that Wang Yi carried was that China will not bow down before rival powers, especially the US. This was quite evident during Wang Yi’s meeting last month with Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken in Indonesia where Wang arrived with a list of four “wrongdoings to be corrected.”
This included that the United States must rectify its “serious Sinophobia.” Later Chinese state-media Global Times warned that the relations would be at a “dead end” if the demands were ignored.
The world order is changing and amid this Wang Yi has been carrying Xi’s message that basically reprimands the US in every way. China is seeking to carve out its place in this changing world order and Wang has become its public face, particularly because Xi hasn’t visited a foreign country since the start of the pandemic.
Wang has been extolling Xi’s vision for China as a global leader that embraces the developing world and that leads an authoritarian axis against the United States and its allies. Another agenda is to align Muslim countries with Beijing.
As China’s approval ratings have plummeted, it is now raising calls to forsake the Sinophobia agenda. However, in the process, China has avoided Europe and ensured a bulwark against Western criticisms to hide its wrongdoing with the Uyghur minority.
He has been the standard-bearer for a hardened stance against Taiwan. Starting with the US, Wang Yi visited the United States just once during the Biden presidency. Wang rebuked Blinken and the president’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, then for imposing sanctions on Chinese officials 24 hours before the meeting, as per the media portal.
“This is not supposed to be the way one should welcome his guests,” Wang said at the outset of the talks. In a not-so-subtle way, Wang is setting up a fight for Asia, with China in one corner and the United States in the other.
“China’s argument is that Asian problems should be solved by Asians,” said Bilahari Kausikan, former foreign secretary of Singapore, who has been with Wang in closed-door diplomatic meetings. “The argument also says that the U.S. is an unreliable troublemaker.”
It comes directly from Xi. “It is for the people of Asia to run the affairs of Asia,” Xi said in 2014 in the early years of his presidency. In this doctrine, the United States is a decades-long interloper in the region and a fading power.
The premise doesn’t always sit well, Kausikan said. It can be interpreted by Asian diplomats as Wang’s positioning China, the region’s biggest economy, as a rich bully, calling the shots in a region with other powerhouses, like Japan and South Korea, both American allies.