But Xie’s arrival suggests that Beijing might want to reduce that bilateral acrimony. And it follows a two-day meeting earlier this month in Vienna between national security adviser Jake Sullivan and China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, that the two sides described as “candid, substantive, and constructive.” Xie’s dispatch from Beijing comes on the heels of Biden’s prediction during a news conference Sunday at the end of the G-7 meeting in Hiroshima, Japan, that bilateral relations will “begin to thaw very shortly.”
The timing of Xie taking up his post “points to a thaw … but will neither reverse nor stop the path of de-risking that both sides are embarked on,” said Ivan Kanapathy, former director for China, Taiwan and Mongolia at the National Security Council.
The State Department declined to comment and the Chinese embassy didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Xie was selected as ambassador over Assistant Foreign Minister Hua Chunying, a Washington, D.C.-based diplomat with expertise in Chinese foreign policy told POLITICO in January. As a foreign ministry spokesperson, Hua has become notorious for sharp-tongued pushback against foreign critics. The Chinese leadership’s choice of Xie may signal a preference for a less-caustic interlocutor in order to ease bilateral antipathy.
But Xie has his own record of wolf warrior-style diplomacy. In his previous role as the foreign ministry’s commissioner in Hong Kong, Xie decried foreign criticism of the territory’s often brutal police response to pro-democracy protesters in 2019 and blamed that unrest on shadowy “foreign forces.” Xie led a frosty meeting with Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman in July 2021 during which he scolded her for what he said was the administration’s “highly misguided mindset and dangerous policy” toward China.
Xie sent Sherman home with a “List of U.S. Wrongdoings that Must Stop” and a “List of Key Individual Cases that China Has Concerns With” to ensure she got the message.
Xie might rethink the wisdom of that approach now that he’s Xi’s point man in the U.S.
“Wolf warrior diplomacy doesn’t go over very well in Washington and I’d be very surprised if he was more of a wolf warrior rather than a problem solver,” said Susan Shirk, former deputy assistant secretary of state in the Clinton administration.