Janet Yellen Declares Biden Admin Is ‘Not Attempting to Decouple from China’: ‘We’re Deepening Our Relationship’

Isaac SchorrOct 16th, 2023, 12:16 pm
 

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told Sky News’ Wilfred Frost that the Biden administration is focused on “deepening” the United States’ relationship with China rather than decoupling from it during an interview aired on Monday.

After Frost asked if the relationship between the world’s two most powerful countries had hit its “floor,” Yellen suggested that the U.S. was indeed seeking a rapprochement of sorts.

“We certainly have improved communication, we’ve set out clearly both to Americans and also to the Chinese, a set of principles that we see as governing our relationship, and they are essentially these” began Yellen.

She continued:

First of all, we will always protect our national security and take a stand against human rights abuses, that’s non-negotiable. But with respect to national security, our objective is not to harm progress in China, it is really oriented at national security and we will try to design our interventions of things like export controls narrowly to keep them focused on real national security concerns.

Second, we are not attempting to decouple from China. We have a deep economic relationship, and that kind of competition, trade, and investment is beneficial to both sides and we want an environment in which it can continue.

And third, we need to cooperate on a variety of global challenges, and I would say climate change is an obvious example and this is, for both, in the interest of both of us and the globe as a whole. That is another area where many countries are heavily indebted, we need to cooperate on debt relief.

So I see those as the governing principles, and we are deepening our relationship, we have established in the aftermath of our visit an economic working group and a financial working group between Treasury and the Ministry of Finance in one case and the People’s Bank of China led by Governor Pan. We expect to have regular communications about economic and financial issues and be able to thoughtfully exchange views and see if we can find a way forward on difficult issues.

 

Yellen’s comments come amidst an ongoing Biden administration effort to seek a détente with China. On the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre earlier this year, Secretary of State Antony Blinken released a noticeably toned-down statement as compared to years past that omitted mentions of those killed back in 1989 as well as the genocide the Chinese Government is currently carrying out against its Uyghur Muslim minority.

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