Editor’s note for May 30, 2023
A note for Access newsletter readers from Jeremy Goldkorn.
Dear reader:
“China rebuffs Pentagon chief, blunting push for rapprochement” is the Wall Street Journal headline about Beijing turning down a Pentagon’s request for a meeting between U.S. defense secretary Lloyd Austin and Chinese defense minister Lǐ Shàngfú 李尚福 at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore this week.
Although the Chinese Communist Party is often rightly blamed for refusing dialogue, it’s not hard to see why they declined this request: Li has been on a U.S. sanctions list since 2018 for authorizing the purchase of fighter jets and missiles from Russia.
Meanwhile in Beijing, Elon Musk today met with Foreign Minister Qín Gāng 秦刚. The official government readout, so far in Chinese only, quotes Musk as saying that “the interests of the United States and China are intertwined, like conjoined twins, who are inseparable from each other,” and that “Tesla opposes ‘decoupling and breaking [supply] chains,’ and is willing to continue to expand its business in China and share China’s development opportunities.”
But other parts of China’s government are sending less welcoming messages. State media today is dominated by reports on the first meeting, chaired by Xí Jìnpíng 习近平, of the National Security Commission under the 20th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. The Party’s paranoia is deepening.
Our Word of the Day is: decoupling and breaking [supply] chains (脱钩断链 tuōgōu duànliàn).
