The US Department of State on Friday launched its long-planned “China House” unit, an internal reorganization to help expand and sharpen its policymaking toward its top geopolitical rival.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken in May announced the creation of China House, calling it a department-wide, integrated team that would coordinate and implement US policy across issues and regions.
“The scale and the scope of the challenge posed by the People’s Republic of China will test American diplomacy like nothing we’ve seen before,” Blinken said in May.
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Blinken on Friday presided over the official opening of the unit, formally called the Office of China Coordination, adding that it would ensure that the US is able to “responsibly manage” competition with Beijing, a department statement said.
China House is to bring together China experts from throughout the department to coordinate with “every regional bureau and experts in international security, economics, technology, multilateral diplomacy and strategic communications,” the statement quoted Blinken as saying.
It is to replace the department’s “China desk,” but would continue to be overseen by US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for China, Taiwan and Mongolia Rick Waters in the Bureau of East Asia and Pacific Affairs, an official said.
China House would be funded out of the existing department budget, and involve additional staff joining as liaisons, embeds and for specific assignments, a State Department spokesman said.
US President Joe Biden’s administration has laid out a strategy to compete with China focused on investing in US competitiveness and aligning with allies and partners.
The two countries have worked to steady relations rocked by a series of recent US moves to expand export controls on strategic technology, such as semiconductors, and an August visit to Taiwan by US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi, to which Beijing responded with large-scale military drills.
Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) met in person on the Indonesian island of Bali earlier last month, and the countries have agreed to follow-up discussions, including a planned visit to China by Blinken early next year.
Biden and Xi in Bali agreed to chart a less volatile path forward in US-China ties, which had nosedived following Pelosi’s Taiwan visit.
The US is rolling out a series of export curbs and restrictions on China’s semiconductor industry, which have led China to file a complaint at the WTO.
The bureaucratic reshuffle follows a similar decision by the CIA to create a China Mission Center in October last year.
That center was meant to strengthen work “on the most important geopolitical threat we face in the 21st century, an increasingly adversarial Chinese government,” CIA Director Bill Burns said at the time.
Additional reporting by Bloomberg
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