China Watches Washington’s Indo-Pacific Summits

On April 11, the first Japan-Philippines-U.S. trilateral summit was held in Washington, D.C., capping off Japanese Prime Minister Kishida Fumio’s state visit to the United States. Both events were notable developments in the U.S. Indo-Pacific strategy: Japan and the United States further upgraded their alliance, and opened a new frontier of maritime security cooperation with Manila, which is embroiled in a tense dispute with China over islets in the South China Sea.

Officials in Beijing were paying close attention to the summitry on the other side of the world, and they made their displeasure clear. “First, China strongly opposes the practice of bloc politics by relevant countries,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said in the regular daily press conference on April 12. “...To know whether the trilateral summit and cooperation is truly not aimed at China, the answer is right there in the trilateral statement. What else could it be if it’s not a smear and attack against China?”

There was plenty for Beijing to find objectionable in the various joint statements and agreements issued during Kishida’s visit. Most of its complaints, however, fell into a few broad categories: rejecting criticism on China’s behavior regarding Taiwan and the South China Sea and generally complaining of “bloc politics” and a “Cold War mentality” as the United States tightens its alliances with China’s neighbors.

Taiwan featured more heavily in the 2024 Japan-U.S. leaders’ statement than ever before, and it’s no surprise that China took notice. “The US and Japan have misrepresented the facts, violated China’s territorial sovereignty and breached international law and basic norms in international relations,” Mao retorted. “They pose the real threat to regional peace and stability.”

Indeed, that was a common theme of China’s official response, across a week’s worth of Foreign Ministry press conferences and state media output: that the United States is an external power deliberately stirring up trouble in China’s home region. “I want to emphasize that China is always a builder of world peace, a contributor to global development and a defender of the international order,” Mao declared – a direct response to the repeated expressions of concern over China’s coercive tactics during the Japan-U.S. and Japan-Philippines-U.S. summits.

“China will defend its sovereignty, security and development interests, and stay committed to the peace, stability and lasting prosperity of the Asia-Pacific region,” Mao continued.

China fleshed this position out most fully on the South China Sea, which was a major focus of the trilateral discussions in Washington. Mao sought to contrast China’s supposedly peaceful and benevolent actions in the South China Sea with destabilizing “U.S. meddling.”

“With the concerted efforts of China and ASEAN countries, the South China Sea situation has been generally stable,” Mao insisted. The real problem, in this framing, is that “[c]ountries outside the region, led by the U.S., have been cobbling together small groupings in the South China Sea.”

China’s main complaint is that the United States is supporting the Philippines in Manila’s own rhetorical campaign against China’s gray zone activities in the South China Sea.

“If the U.S. truly wants peace and stability in the South China Sea, it should stop fueling the tensions, forming gangs, and inciting confrontation,” as Mao put it.

Mao’s argument – although never outright stated as such – is that, absent the U.S. presence, China could steamroll its smaller rival claimants into submission. That’s Beijing’s vision of peace.

As usual, however, Chinese officials seemed to find it more convenient to aim much of their ire at Japan. While the U.S. received plenty of criticism, Japan was in for a special scolding, with numerous references to “Japan’s not-too-distant history of militarist aggression.” Mao even made a point of confirming that “China has lodged serious representations to Japan on the negative elements concerning China in the U.S.-Japan leaders’ talks and the U.S.-Japan-Philippines leaders’ summit.” Japan’s dressing-down was mentioned twice; curiously, there was no specific confirmation that China had issued a formal demarche to U.S. officials over the summit.

In another telling example, in the regular press conference on April 16, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian slammed Japan for “stoking bloc confrontation” and hyping the “China threat.” Only moments earlier, however, he chose to focus only on the positives from a China-U.S. diplomatic meeting, noting that both sides had agreed “to continue implementing the San Francisco vision, maintain exchanges at various levels and further stabilize and grow China-US relations.”

The full readout of the meeting – between China’s Vice Foreign Minister Ma Zhaoxu and a delegation of visiting U.S. officials, led by Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Daniel Kritenbrink – was less sanguine. It noted that Ma reprimanded the U.S. for its “its erroneous words and actions related to China taken in China's neighborhood, in particular its attempts to build a circle of the United States, Japan and the Philippines and its disturbance of the situation in the South China Sea.”

But Lin was apparently given the directive to avoid including that level of criticism in his briefer summary of the talks.

Overall, China’s response to the big week for U.S. Indo-Pacific diplomacy was fairly muted. The expected rhetorical objections were all there, but there were no special statements issued specifically on either the Japan-U.S. summit or the Japan-Philippines-U.S. summit. And the quick turn-around between Kishida’s state visit to Washington and the welcoming of a U.S. delegation to Beijing suggests business as usual is the order of the day in the China-U.S. relationship. Just two weeks after Kishida departed Washington, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was in China for a visit.

Meanwhile, the Foreign Ministry press conferences devoted more time and energy to criticizing the new focus on “overcapacity” in China’s new energy industries – a point of concern raised by both U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in recent visits to Beijing.

This suggests that China’s real focus is on preserving space for its economy to grow in 2024.