Unfortunately, most official visits to China were halted for the past three years, when China closed itself off during the covid pandemic. Also during that period, congressional visits to Taiwan — which China considers a renegade province — reached a decade-long high. Those included a trip by then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), to which Beijing responded by cutting off contacts and launching military exercises around Taiwan.
Now comes news that two congressional delegations plan to travel to China this fall. One will be led by Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), and the other will be a House trip led by Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), a member of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party. These trips are welcome and a long-overdue way to resume normal communications between Washington and Beijing.
Yet Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.) called the Senate trip, which he was invited to join, “ill-advised,” because, he said, “you need to be dealing from a position of strength.” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) said he was concerned about the United States looking as though it were kowtowing to China.
The criticisms are not only wrong but also dangerous. The notion that high-level U.S. officials should not be engaging with China through visits — and the critics have also targeted Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen among other Biden administration officials — implies that isolating China is better than communicating.
Mr. Schumer, for one, has consistently advocated a firmer line against China’s currency manipulation and what he has called the country’s unfair trade practices. He was instrumental in pushing legislation boosting investment in the American semiconductor industry to reduce reliance on China. Even a China “hawk” recognizes the importance of talking to Beijing.
We’ve argued before about the necessity of enhancing dialogue and keeping channels of communication open, as a way to help de-escalate tensions and avoid the potential danger of a misunderstanding turning into an unintended military mishap. The United States learned that lesson over and over again during the Cold War, in which American officials wisely chose to negotiate with the Soviet Union, a country with which economic and other ties were far less substantial. These planned congressional visits are a good step at resuming the type of dialogues that used to be commonplace.
The naysayers might consider hopping on a plane, instead.
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