U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen embarrassed herself in front of a Chinese official during her visit to Beijing earlier this month.
On the second day of Yellen’s four-day trip to China, the American Treasury Secretary bowed to her Chinese counterpart multiple times without reciprocation, which is a sign of diplomatic weakness.
“Never, ever, ever,” Bradley Blakeman, a senior staffer from the Bush administration, told The New York Post. “An American official does not bow. It looks like she’s been summoned to the principal’s office, and that’s exactly the optics the Chinese love.”
“Bowing is not part of the accepted protocol,” agreed Jerome A. Cohen, an emeritus professor at New York University and expert in Chinese law and government.
Yellen then later fumbled Vice Premier He Lifeng’s name, calling him “Vice Premier Hu” as she opened the first official American meeting with the economic chief.
“I strongly believe that the relationship between our two countries is rooted in the solid ties between the American and Chinese people,” Yellen said in her initial statement. “It is important that we keep nurturing and deepening these ties.”
She went on to try and convince the world’s largest polluter to cut back on carbon emissions to curb climate change, as well as plead for both countries to establish a “healthy economic competition that is not winner-take-all.”
“We have a duty to both our own countries and to other countries to cooperate” on environmental issues, Yellen continued. “Where we have concerns about specific economic practices, we should and will communicate them directly.”
This comes just days after China abruptly announced new export restrictions on gallium and germanium, two metals essential for semiconductor manufacture. The communist nation claimed the restrictions were necessary to “safeguard national security and interests,” and the move was widely viewed as retaliation for American restrictions on Chinese technology.
Additionally, China also ratcheted up its pressure on Taiwan shortly after Yellen touched down in Beijing by sending 13 People’s Liberation Army aircraft and six boats into the airspace and waterways of the independent island democracy that the CCP claims as its own.
“The way to treat an adversary is, you don’t go hat in hand,” Blakeman said. “But with this administration, time and time again, we embarrass ourselves and show weakness. And it just shows the lack of effective leverage we have.”
