Biden Administration Joins Celebrations for Communist China’s 75th Birthday

S enior Biden administration officials flocked to celebrations in Washington, D.C., and New York City to mark the 75th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China this week.

The national day of the People’s Republic of China takes place on October 1 every year and is celebrated in the United States by China’s diplomatic missions and pro-Beijing community groups. In a statement marking the occasion, issued October 2, Secretary of State Antony Blinken congratulated the people of the PRC on the government’s founding and emphasized that the U.S. “will maintain open lines of communication” with Beijing.

This year, “China Day,” as it is sometimes known, came as President Biden seeks to stabilize the U.S. relationship with Beijing, at times placing a priority on the preservation of high-level diplomatic contact over robust advocacy on human-rights concerns.

“It’s entirely appropriate to release a statement on America standing with the Chinese people, as prior administrations have done,” said Michael Sobolik, senior fellow in Indo-Pacific studies at the American Foreign Policy Council and author of Countering China’s Great Game. “But standing with the CCP effectively celebrates Mao Zedong’s violent establishment of the PRC and legitimizes the party. That’s a fatal strategic miscalculation.” Instead, he said, “American policy-makers should be looking for ways to highlight the party’s lack of legitimacy within China.”

Leading up to October 1, administration officials attended China Day receptions to demonstrate their commitment to engaging PRC officials.

Daniel Kritenbrink, the assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, and the National Security Council’s China director, Sarah Beran, posed for a picture with Chinese ambassador Xie Feng at the Chinese embassy’s reception on September 30. Xie later posted that picture and others from the event to X.

Kritenbrink spoke briefly at the event, the South China Morning Post reported. “I can assure you to all of my friends here that the United States of America will remain committed to doing everything possible, to maximizing cooperation, to managing our many differences, and to doing so in every instance in the most responsible way possible,” he said.

U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Linda Thomas Greenfield then attended a China Day reception hosted on October 1 by Beijing’s mission to the U.N. in Manhattan. There, she gave a short interview to China’s CCTV propaganda outlet, saying: “I just want to congratulate you on your national day and continue the relationship that we have moving forward.”

In a statement to National Review, a State Department spokesperson said: “There is long-standing precedent for senior U.S. officials to attend National Day receptions of nations with whom we have diplomatic ties, including the PRC.”

Washington has long sent officials to the Chinese embassy’s national day reception. But since the middle of the Trump administration, U.S. officials have adopted a tougher posture toward Beijing, accusing it of engaging in egregious human-rights abuses, including the genocide of Uyghurs, and repression activities targeting Americans. U.S. officials’ participation in the PRC events comes as Biden has placed an emphasis on re-establishing lines of communication with Beijing, sometimes at the expense of promoting accountability for human-rights abuses and other malfeasance.

The White House last month voiced its opposition to the “STOP CCP Act,” a bill that would slap CCP central-committee members with sanctions if they are determined to have played a role in Beijing’s human-rights atrocities. It warned that the bill “would likely cut off any channels of communication between our two governments and undermine the Administration’s efforts to build diplomatic consensus on China” without actually preventing the Chinese government from continuing those policies. The White House said that sanctions policy should remain “flexible.”

U.S. participation in the events also followed the Justice Department’s indictment of a former aide to New York governors who allegedly took direction from the Chinese consulate general and, specifically, Huang Ping, Beijing’s top diplomat on the East Coast. That led New York governor Kathy Hochul to call for Huang’s expulsion, after which the State Department declined to force him to leave and said that his term was reaching its scheduled end.

Representative Judy Chu (D., Calif.) also attended a China Day reception, appearing at a banquet hosted by local pro-Beijing community organizations in the Los Angeles area, according to the Chinese-language outlet AMTV. The event featured U.S. and PRC flag-raising ceremonies and was coordinated by Lu Qiang, a local leader of overseas Chinese community organizations who paid for buses to take pro-Beijing demonstrators to San Francisco last November to welcome Xi Jinping for his appearance at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit. Lu is also an overseas delegate to the Chinese People’s Political and Consultative Conference, a rubber-stamp body for the Chinese regime and an important coordinating mechanism for its “united front” political-influence ecosystem.

Chu’s office, the National Security Council, and the U.S. mission to the U.N. did not respond to NR’s requests for comment.