While there is a political crisis between China and the USA, economic diplomacy is in full swing. After Elon Musk and Tim Cook, Bill Gates has now met the Chinese government.
The words used by China’s Foreign Minister Qin Gang in a phone call with his US counterpart Antony Blinken earlier this week were harsh: don’t interfere in our internal affairs, respect our claims on Taiwan, stop undermining our sovereignty.
China’s state media presented the phone call at the beginning of the week as a Chinese demonstration of power against the US government. A similar tone was repeatedly used on the Chinese side towards US government officials.
Bill Gates – the “first American friend”
China’s communist leadership treats American business representatives in a completely opposite way. In Beijing today, head of state and party leader Xi Jinping received Bill Gates, the founder of the software company Microsoft and head of the charitable foundation named after him.
A government spokeswoman called Gates “the first American friend” Xi met in person this year. At the end of May, China’s Foreign Minister Qin Gang posed smiling in Beijing with the head of the US car company Tesla, Elon Musk. Apple boss Tim Cook appeared at a state-organized economic conference in China at the end of March.
Chinese leadership’s “parallel diplomacy”.
China’s leadership is striving to meet with as many high-ranking foreign business representatives as possible – after all, the economy in the People’s Republic is currently weakening, says Agatha Kratz, an expert on China’s global trade diplomacy at the economic research institute Rhodium Group in Paris. It is currently incredibly difficult for the US government to speak to representatives of the Chinese leadership.
Agreed meetings would be cancelled, agreements not kept. According to Kratz, it cannot be ruled out that the demonstrative wooing of US business representatives is a kind of planned parallel diplomacy by the Chinese government.
US Secretary of State Blinken is expected in China on Sunday for the first time during his tenure. A meeting of the defense ministers of the two countries at a security conference in Singapore requested by the United States had been canceled by China’s government in early June.