Opinion | Diplomacy failed in Ukraine. US and China must not let it happen twice

Right when diplomacy is needed more than ever, top diplomatic figures in the US and China are resorting to open hostility

The crisis in Ukraine should serve as a warning to both powers to set aside ideological differences for the sake of world peace

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Published: 1:00am, 7 Apr 2022Updated: 2:27am, 7 Apr 2022

The new US ambassador to China, Nicholas Burns, finally arrived in Beijing last month, and set about attending to business after a required spell of Covid-19 quarantine in the capital. Indeed, for the most important bilateral relationship in the world, it is extraordinary that the ambassador’s post had been left vacant for nearly a year before Burns was appointed to fill it in December.

Supposedly personifying diplomacy – defined as “the established method of influencing the decisions and behaviour of foreign governments and peoples through dialogue, negotiation and other measures short of war or violence” by Encyclopaedia Britannica – Burns instead made his stage debut at the US Senate nomination hearing with a show of outright hostility towards Beijing.

He called China an “aggressor”; denounced its alleged bad behaviour in Xinjiang, Tibet and Hong Kong, saying that its actions “are unjust and must stop”; and, regarding Taiwan, declared that “we certainly cannot trust the Chinese” and that “our responsibility is to make Taiwan a tough nut to crack”.

Hardly the rhetoric expected from an envoy in this context. The sentiment was reciprocated by Cui Tiankai, China’s longest-serving ambassador to the US who retired from the post last June, when he spoke at a forum in Beijing two months later.

Having been characteristically soft-spoken as the face of China in Washington, Cui finally seemed unable to repress his strong conviction that “the US will not willingly accept the rise of a power with a very different social system, ideology, cultural traditions and even ethnicity”, accusing the US of “a very strong element of racism” in its China policy.

The open tit-for-tat between the veteran diplomats offers just one example of diplomacy being enervated at a time when it is more in demand than at any other moment since the end of the Cold War.