1st call between Marco Rubio and Wang Yi
Neither State Department nor MOFA is gonna like this piece.
Wang Yi and Marco Rubio, the respective top diplomats of China and the U.S., held their first phone call on Friday, January 24, 2025. Below are a few points I want to make.
First, the State Department, now under Rubio, misidentified Wang’s job title in its readout.
Wang holds two jobs concurrently, Director of the Office of the Central Foreign Affairs Commission of the Communist Party of China and Foreign Minister of the government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). On the first part, the State Department readout erroneously describes him as Director of the Central Foreign Affairs Commission. The person holding that position is Xi Jinping.
Don’t start making a big fuss about Rubio or even Trump yet. The State Department under Antony Blinken repeatedly made the same mistake, too, although Blinken’s Twitter at least twice correctly identified Wang as head of the office of the commission rather than the commission. [2023-06-19][2023-07-13]
There is extremely little public information about the Central Foreign Affairs Commission of the Communist Party of China. The commission held its first meeting on May 15, 2018, according to a readout. Xi was the director of the commission, China’s then premier Li Keqiang was deputy director of the commission, and then vice president of the PRC Wang Qishan was a member of the commision. There were other member(s) of the commission, but they were unidentified. The meeting adopted working rules of the commission but they are publicly unavailable.
I can go on, but the heart of the matter is that Wang Yi is the director of the office of the commission, but not the commission itself. Current deputy directors of the office include Guo Yezhou, formerly the first deputy minister of the International Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (IDCPC), and Li Kexin, formerly the Director-General of the Department of International Economic Affairs of the Foreign Ministry. Liu Jianchao, the Minister of IDCPC, was previously a deputy director of the office.
Neil Thomas of the Asia Society Policy Institute also noticed the mistake on Twitter.
Second, I think there is an oversight in the Chinese readout of the phone call. Compared with getting the job title wrong, this flaw is minor, but it’s about Taiwan, and as everyone keeps saying Taiwan is the most dangerous place on earth, here are a few inks spilled for you.
This will be harder to explain, so let’s start with the structure of a Chinese official readout of international interactions. Typically, 85%, 90%, if not more, of the readout is what the........
© Pearls and Irritations
visit website