China and US urged to work together in fight against climate change after Alaska summit
- While the meeting in Anchorage highlighted some areas of disagreement, there are still areas where the two sides can find common ground
- Joe Biden is planning to hold an international climate summit next month, and Chinese President Xi Jinping’s involvement may be on the table
Senior diplomats from Beijing and Washington have been urged to seek common ground on climate change after this week’s high-level talks in Alaska.
Yang Jiechi and Wang Yi, China’s two most senior diplomats, kicked off the much-watched summit with US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan on Thursday local time.
The meeting opened with a series of fierce public exchanges between the two sides and expectations for any breakthrough were low.
But diplomatic observers said the two sides could still try to find common ground, including in some key areas such as the environment.
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“President [Joe] Biden won the election by going big on climate change, he’s holding a climate change summit in April and you’ll have to have China in the meeting,” said Wang Huiyao, founder of the Centre for China and Globalisation, a Beijing-based non-governmental think tank.
The summit will be held in Washington on Earth Day, and Biden has described it as “an essential element of US foreign policy and national security.
“They’ll have to talk about whether Xi [Jinping] will participate, what the consensus is between the two leaders of the world’s largest carbon emitters.”
Xi has already promised to reach peak emissions before 2030 and make China carbon neutral by 2060, but the US expects China to go further, said Li Shuo, senior global policy adviser for Greenpeace East Asia.
“China could have different ways of making commitments,” said Li. “For example, it can set a cap on carbon emissions, or make a commitment on coal-fired power plants.”
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He also said it would be a positive step if the two sides could progressively establish an outcome-oriented mechanism.
“The US has been absent from the global climate community for four years and its prestige has dropped significantly,” said Yang Fuqiang, a senior adviser in Beijing to US environmental group the Natural Resources Defence Council.
“Now it wants to occupy the moral high ground and keep its leading role.”
Wang also said the two sides could also seek to cooperate on global health governance and debt relief for poorer countries.
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“China and the US should talk about how to work together on vaccine production distribution, and licensing,” he said.
The two sides could also use the meeting in Alaska to explore setting up a secure channel of communications, said Liu Weidong, a US affairs specialist from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a think tank affiliated with the central government.
“I think the two sides should establish a special envoy on each side, exclusively tasked with bilateral ties,” he said.
“The channel should be secured regardless of friction between the two sides … finger pointing and sanctions aside, the channel would remain.”
Beijing has referred to the meeting as a “strategic dialogue”, hearkening back to the “strategic and economic dialogue” under the Obama administration. But Blinken has explicitly rejected this description.
“I don’t think the old ways … are possible under the current situation,” said Liu. “It needs a more friendly environment from both sides.”
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Both Beijing and Washington also have a common interest in North Korea, said Zhao Tong, an associate at the nuclear policy programme at the Carnegie – Tsinghua Centre for Global Policy.
“The Biden administration understands that the most urgent thing is to stop North Korea from developing even more powerful weapons and is likely to be more pragmatic with sanctions,” said Zhao.
He added that China supports an interim deal between Washington and Pyongyang to stop North Korea from developing long-range missiles.
“China is very supportive of the deal and time is running out as it becomes more and more likely that such tests will be restarted,” he said.
