OPINION:
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s meeting with top Chinese counterparts in Hawaii on Wednesday was held in secret. The list of topics for painstaking dialogue may have been long, but one underlying sentiment likely linked them all: Misery loves company.
The smiles that American and Chinese representatives shared during their earlier confabs began to fade a year ago with the hardening of stances and feelings over trade. Then the novel coronavirus pandemic that erupted in China and spread unchecked across the world turned faces from glum to grim. As a result, hope for a U.S.-China relationship built upon healthy — and fair — competition between the two largest economies has plunged. The mutual willingness for conversation, thankfully, means rock-bottom hasn’t loomed into view yet.
Honolulu, the site of the bilateral gathering that brought Mr. Pompeo together with Chinese Communist Party Politburo Member Yang Jiechi, is a long way from the U.S. mainland, but gloom is harder to quarantine than the deadly virus. A matter-of-fact statement from the State Department accompanying the meeting emphasized “the need for fully-reciprocal dealings between the two nations across commercial, security, and diplomatic interactions,” but did not include so much as a diplomatic “aloha” for effect.
For good reason, Americans are the most miserable they have been in 50 years. A survey taken by NORC, a research institute at the University of Chicago, found that only 14 percent of American adults said they were very happy. Since the survey began in 1972, the previously smallest proportion who claimed to have a droop-proof smile had been 29 percent.
Sadly, U.S. deaths from COVID-19 have surpassed 120,000, with more than 2.2 million Americans infected — something unimaginable when 2020 dawned. By contrast, mainland China, where the Wuhan virus originated, has lost fewer than 4,700. And while the International Monetary Fund has projected the world economy will contract by 3% this year and a devastating 5.9% in the U.S., China’s is expected to expand, albeit by a meager 1.2%.
No one should wish misfortune on fellow human beings, but China’s robust success in protecting its own people while not bothering to warn the world of danger has been a bitter pill for Americans to swallow.
Rather than suffer the indignity of apologizing for its failure, cheerless China has attempted to drown out complaints over its culpability for the global pandemic by turning up the volume on its denunciations of U.S. deeds.
Angered by President Trump’s finger-pointing at its apparent mishandling of the coronavirus, Beijing has seized upon the recent series of race riots that have swept across the U.S. homeland. These have served as a handy argument that Americans should fix their own record of racial injustice before mouthing off about persecution of the minority Uighur population locked in detention camps among the Chinese hinterlands.
Undaunted, Mr. Trump in Washington signed the Uighur Human Rights Policy Act, a bill directing the federal government to keep tabs on abuses of the ethnic minority Muslims, as U.S. and Chinese diplomats faced off in Hawaii. China’s Foreign Ministry expressed “strong dissatisfaction” with the move, and is likely even less pleased with the president’s decision to begin canceling special treatment for Hong Kong in response to Beijing’s plans to impose national security rules on the autonomous former British colony. At least Mr. Pompeo refrained to drumming “Wipeout” on the negotiating table with his lunch-time chopsticks.
The Chinese diplomatic pot doesn’t need more stirring, but former Trump National Security Adviser John Bolton has dug in uninvited. In a tell-all book excerpted prior to publication, Mr. Bolton claims the president asked China for help in strengthening economic ties in order to win re-election in 2020. Fact or fiction, the allegation alone could have the effect of widening the U.S.-China rift as both nations take measures to disprove the existence of any self-serving deal-making.
In the meantime, Chinese military jets act out official anger by buzzing ships in the Taiwan Straits. And by blowing up a Korean reunification building, loyal wingman Kim Jong-un of North Korea has shown his fellow authoritarians that he feels their pain. Like pathogens, frowns are contagious.
Misery may love company, but so does good cheer. When the pestilence passes, there is reason for hope that the U.S.-China blues will lift.
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