Biden administration officials have a longtime, if sometimes combative, relationship with Wang Yi, the veteran Chinese diplomat who is returning as foreign minister after the unexplained ouster of his successor.
(Bloomberg) — Biden administration officials have a longtime, if sometimes combative, relationship with Wang Yi, the veteran Chinese diplomat who is returning as foreign minister after the unexplained ouster of his successor.
“It is up to China to decide who their foreign minister is,” Vedant Patel, a State Department spokesman, told reporters Tuesday. But he added that Secretary of State Antony Blinken has met with Wang repeatedly, including in Jakarta and Beijing.
China removed Qin Gang as foreign minister just seven months into the job with no explanation, after the diplomat mysteriously disappeared from public view in June. Qin is a longtime foreign policy adviser to President Xi Jinping who previously served as ambassador to the US.
Read more: China Replaces Foreign Minister After Mysterious Absence
“Wang Yi is an obvious replacement for Qin Gang right now,” Rorry Daniels, managing director of the Asia Society Policy Institute, said in a statement. “With a series of major international meetings coming up, Xi defaulted to someone who has relationships with many of his foreign counterparts.”
Jake Sullivan, President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, has been closely engaged with Wang through a back channel they have kept low-key. Bloomberg News reported in March that they held a phone call to discuss the pending transit of Taiwan’s president through the US.
Sullivan has said their conversations have a “brush-clearing” quality.
“It allows for a frank and candid interchange of ideas where we don’t then have to go out and intermediate what we said to one another through the media or score points or do things like that,” Sullivan said last week at the Aspen Security Forum. “So I think that matters.”
But Wang also can be combative in more formal encounters. When Blinken traveled to Beijing last month, the Chinese diplomat blamed frayed bilateral ties on Washington’s “wrongful perceptions” of Beijing.
Asked at the Aspen forum what was behind Qin’s disappearance from public view, Sullivan said, “Literally, we don’t know. All we know is that Secretary Blinken was meant to meet the foreign minister at the recent ASEAN conference in Indonesia. He ended up meeting with Wang Yi instead.”
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