The Biden administration’s attempts at Sino–American dialogue are taking precedence over warnings about the Chinese Communist Party’s reach into the U.S.
Alejandro Mayorkas finds himself under a microscope as the knock-down, drag-out political fight about his tenure at the Department of Homeland Security rages at home. But when he went abroad last week, the homeland-security secretary did something that went almost entirely overlooked: He held a meeting in Vienna with Wang Xiaohong, China’s minister of public security. Wang’s Ministry of Public Security is a counterintelligence and security arm that the U.S. Justice Department has placed at the center of multiple recent plots targeting Americans, both in cyberspace and on U.S. soil.
This was Wang’s second conversation with Mayorkas, after the two officials held a video conference last month, and it follows a visit by Liu Jianchao, a top Chinese Communist Party official, to Washington last month for meetings with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Council officials. While Liu, who China-watchers believe will soon be appointed the next minister of foreign affairs, is considered tactful and urbane, he has a dark past. Until recently, he led China’s worldwide campaign to extrajudicially force the return of fugitives to China — an operation that the FBI has warned for years is also illegally targeting people in America.
Why are U.S. officials meeting with these unsavory characters? It’s part of a broader diplomatic strategy. Since last November’s meeting between President Joe Biden and General Secretary Xi Jinping in San Francisco, Washington and Beijing have brought about a “stabilization” of ties — that is, a temporary, modest rapprochement founded on several ongoing bilateral dialogues on defense, the global economy, climate change, agriculture, and more. Among the most prominent of these efforts involves talks to get Beijing to enforce its counter-narcotics laws in such a way as to stop Chinese firms from exporting fentanyl-precursor chemicals to organizations that will then sell the drug to Americans. China withdrew from talks on the topic in 2022 to punish America for then–House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan.
In a series of meetings leading up to San Francisco, Chinese officials demanded one big concession for the resumption of dialogue on countering drug-trafficking: the first ever rollback of U.S. sanctions imposed on a Chinese-government entity implicated directly in the Chinese Communist Party’s campaign against Uyghurs. The White House ultimately figured that removing the sanctions on that organization, a forensics lab operated by the Ministry of Public Security that took DNA samples from Uyghurs, was, on balance, a small price to pay for getting China to the table. This was one of the immediate outcomes of the Biden–Xi meeting in November. Now, Beijing appears to have kept its end of the bargain: On January 30, U.S. officials met their Chinese counterparts in Beijing for the first meeting of a bilateral working group on counter-narcotics.
Getting Chinese officials to the table is no guarantee that these talks will get results. Nury Turkel, a member of the U.S. Commission for International Religious Freedom, and a Uyghur-American who can’t visit his mother in Xinjiang, told me last year: “I feel like we got ourselves into another trap, with the Chinese making a promise or symbolic gesture or pledge to address this public-health crisis.”
Meanwhile, this diplomatic channel grants some degree of legitimacy to a Chinese-government agency that the U.S. Justice Department has accused of operating “a series of brazen and aggressive criminal schemes,” as FBI director Christopher Wray put it when charges against Ministry of Public Security officials and people linked to them were unveiled last April. The ministry has directed stalking and espionage campaigns against Chinese dissidents in America and controlled networks of inauthentic social-media accounts to harass Beijing’s U.S.-based opponents, according to court documents. To open this direct channel between Wang and Mayorkas is to say that the ministry is a valued partner rather than a vector of authoritarian repression that strikes directly at Americans.
According to a DHS summary of the February 18 meeting between Mayorkas and Wang, the two officials covered some worthy topics. In addition to exploring areas of cooperation on counter-narcotics work, they talked about the ways in which China and the U.S. could work together to fight child sexual abuse online. But did Mayorkas raise the thornier issues outlined in DOJ court documents? The summary doesn’t say, though it mentions that “the Secretary reiterated that the United States will stand up for our interests and values and those of our allies and partners.” Beijing made sure to note in its own summary of the meeting that Wang lectured Mayorkas about the purported harassment of Chinese students and the importance of ensuring the protecting of Chinese diplomatic facilities in the U.S.
Mayorkas, Blinken, and other top U.S. officials have sounded the alarm for years about “transnational repression” schemes by foreign dictatorships that target people in the United States. But as the Biden administration pursues this stabilization agenda, the perceived need for U.S. dialogue with China is taking precedence over warnings about the Chinese Communist Party’s repression and its reach into America.