Friendly Relations With CCP Unmaintainable: Gordon Chang

Chinese leader Xi Jinping (R) receives U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken prior to their meeting at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on June 19, 2023. (Leah Millis/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

It’s impossible to maintain the kind of friendly relationship the Biden administration seeks to build with China, especially in the light of revelations about the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic and the widely anticipated invasion of Taiwan, said economist and longtime China observer Gordon Chang.

“The Biden administration wants to establish channels of communication with Communist China. But the problem is, when you start thinking about the irreconcilable differences between China’s regime and the United States, that it’s just not going to work,” Chang said in an interview with EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders.”

The interview comes after the U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken returned from a trip to Beijing and declared that his conversation with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) head Xi Jinping had successfully “injected some greater stability” into the intensified bilateral relationship. That statement was soon put to the test when President Joe Biden called Xi a dictator, saying that Xi was very upset when a Chinese surveillance balloon was blown off course over the United States earlier this year.

“That’s a great embarrassment for dictators. When they didn’t know what happened. That wasn’t supposed to be going where it was. It was blown off course,” Biden said at a fundraiser in California on Tuesday.

The Chinese government reacted with fury, claiming that Biden’s remarks “seriously violated China’s political dignity” and amounted to “political provocation.” It has also reportedly reprimanded the U.S. ambassador to China, Nicholas Burns.

“This shows you no matter how you try, you’re dealing with an evil regime, and things like this are going to happen,” Chang told host Jan Jekielek.

“Biden was actually trying to accommodate Xi Jinping by saying, ‘Well, Xi Jinping didn’t know about the spy balloon; it’s not his fault.’ But he just tripped over himself,” Chang said. “The relations are going to be affected by it. Beijing is going to see this as more proof that the United States is hostile.”

A Taiwan War Scenario

When asked about Blinken’s comment that the United States “does not support Taiwan independence,” Chang said this is consistent with longstanding U.S. policy guided by the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979.

“Technically, yes, U.S. policy doesn’t support Taiwan independence. But as Blinken also said, we support only a peaceful resolution of the status of Taiwan,” Chang explained.

“Our ‘One China’ policy is this: we recognize the Communist Party as a legitimate ruler of China. We also acknowledge in the sense of saying, ‘We understand that’s what they’re saying, but we don’t necessarily accept it, that Taiwan is part of the People’s Republic,’” he continued. “We also say that Taiwan’s status is unresolved and can only be resolved peacefully—in other words, with the approval of people on both sides of the strait.”

“Now, if you look at all of that, yes, we don’t ’support Taiwan independence,'” Chang told Jekielek. “The problem with Blinken’s statement was that after a trip where the Chinese deliberately humiliated him from the very beginning to the very end, he should not have said anything that Beijing wanted to hear. So that, I think, is the fault.”

According to Chang, while the United States doesn’t have any legal obligation to defend Taiwan against an attack by China, it almost certainly would get involved on Taiwan’s behalf because of its obligations to defend Japan, known as Article Five.

“For China to successfully invade Taiwan, they’ve got to impose a blockade. For a blockade to work, it’s got to be big enough to include sovereign Japanese territory. In other words, an assault on Japanese sovereignty,” he explained. “That would trigger Article Five if Japan wanted to invoke it, which they certainly would.”

Chang also suggested that the U.S. government should be making plans to evacuate citizens from China, considering the CCP’s notorious history of taking foreign nationals hostage as leverage in international disputes.

“At some point, we should be saying that if you don’t get yourself out of China, it will no longer be the goal of American foreign policy to rescue you because we do not believe we should hold our policies hostage,” he said. “You just shouldn’t be there. So get out.”

The COVID Revelations

“The Chinese regime has declared a people’s war on the United States and is, in fact, killing Americans with fentanyl and with COVID,” Chang told Jekielek, noting that the CCP might not have the capability to weaponize bat coronavirus if the U.S. government didn’t outsource gain-of-function research to the Wuhan lab.

“This would not have happened if the French hadn’t provided the Wuhan Institute of Neurology facilities. This would not have happened if the United States wasn’t funding this,” he added. “Would the Chinese have been weaponizing coronaviruses? Maybe we don’t know. But we know that they did it with U.S. government money.”

“Again, as Biden tries to maintain ‘friendly’ relations and channels of communication, how can you do that when eventually we are going to see that intelligence, and it’s going to show that the Chinese regime was manipulating coronaviruses gain-of-function research and weaponizing all of this?”

“They knew that COVID-19 was highly transmissible human to human. But in December 2019 and January 2020, they told the world it was not,” Chang continued. “And they did other things which make it appear that they deliberately spread this disease beyond China’s borders. That’s about seven million people who died who should never have contracted the disease. How can you maintain friendly relations Once that information is out into the public?”

“We have to understand that it’s a militant, aggressive, evil regime. And you cannot maintain the relations that the President wants to have.”