Can climate envoy John Kerry lower the heat in US-China relations? - South China Morning Post

Can climate envoy John Kerry lower the heat in US-China relations? | South China Morning Post

US climate envoy John Kerry will arrive in China on Sunday for a long-anticipated trip, amid hopes that ties between the two countries may be on the mend following a series of high-level exchanges. “During meetings with PRC [People’s Republic of China] officials, Secretary Kerry aims to engage with the PRC on addressing the climate crisis, including with respect to increasing implementation and ambition and promoting a successful COP28,” the US State Department said in a statement. China’s Ministry of Ecology and Environment said the two sides will have an “in-depth exchange of views on cooperation to address climate change” during the visit, which will finish next Wednesday. Kerry, 79, will become the third senior figure in the administration of US President Joe Biden to visit China in recent weeks – Secretary of State Antony Blinken was in the Chinese capital last month and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen was there last week. Kerry had previously made two visits to China in 2021. Analysts said Kerry’s visit would be significant both for renewing climate talks between the world’s two biggest greenhouse gas emitters and for moving beyond their political impasse. But no breakthroughs are likely to come from the trip, with Beijing and Washington expected to continue to bicker over whether climate change should be viewed as a “critical stand-alone issue”, as Kerry suggested, separate from other bilateral disagreements. Pang Zhongying, a professor of international affairs at Sichuan University, said climate still represented the best hope for bilateral cooperation. “I think the two sides need at least to show it is still possible for them to cooperate on some issues, such as climate change, when official and unofficial exchanges have been reduced to a bare minimum and there is almost no cooperation going on,” he said. Pang said that as with the Blinken and Yellen trips, Kerry’s visit was meant to help stabilise relations and would go beyond discussions about global warming and other climate issues. Scientists to reveal Anthropocene ‘golden spike’, defining human era The trips, according to Washington, are part of the White House’s efforts to put a floor under US-China ties and keep lines of communication open with Beijing to avoid miscalculations. China suspended climate and other bilateral channels in protest at former US House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in August last year. Climate discussions have remained largely on hold since then, although Xi and Biden gave the green light for Kerry and his Chinese counterpart Xie Zhenhua to meet last year when they met on the sidelines of the United Nations climate talks in Egypt’s Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh. The pair spoke twice virtually this year, in January and April, but have not met since November. After the April talks, Kerry confirmed that Xie had invited him to visit China “in the near term” and the American hoped the two sides could “get back to where we were two years ago” with the visit. Experts also noted that Xie, 73, had “something of a stroke” in January, Kerry told Foreign Policy magazine, adding uncertainty to bilateral climate talks. A mainland climate expert, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Kerry’s trip was mainly aimed at strengthening personal bonds with Xie, while exploring the possibility of climate cooperation. “Both sides still hope to use climate cooperation to stabilise and improve bilateral ties, but that’s a tall order. I don’t think there is much expectation on both sides for any substantial outcome out of Kerry’s visit,” he said. He said joint efforts on climate issues, which had been allowed to move forward before Pelosi’s Taipei visit, had been severely affected by the escalating tensions over Taiwan. “There is simply no way for climate change to stay insulated from the overall political ties, as Kerry and the US side have consistently requested,” he added. But observers said Beijing might still have hopes for the former secretary of state to help reset the relationship with his political influence in Washington. Unlike Biden or many of his cabinet members, Kerry, who helped broker the historic Paris climate agreement under former president Barack Obama, has largely been seen positively in China. Li Shuo, senior global policy adviser at Greenpeace China, said that aside from meeting Xie, there was a chance that Kerry would meet Xi, which would be a subtle but significant signal for the long-stalled climate talks. Xi met Blinken during his China visit, but was in Jiangsu province when Yellen visited Beijing. But Li said there was another possibility – that Kerry would be greeted by executive Vice-Premier Ding Xuexiang, a member of the all-powerful Politburo Standing Committee. European Union climate chief Frans Timmermans met Ding in Beijing on Tuesday. “That’d be important for the global climate agenda and US-China relations too. Kerry’s visit is further proof that climate change still matters in bilateral ties and it has some good potential,” he said. But it would be unrealistic to expect a joint statement or any breakthroughs, Li said. “Apparently, the Chinese side is unlikely to make key concessions or give in to the US pressure at the moment,” he said. The extreme heatwaves affecting both China and the US, including the unusually long streaks of hot weather in Beijing over the past three weeks, should give the rival powers an incentive to tackle the unfolding climate crisis together, Li noted. According to Li, Kerry is expected to press China to accelerate cuts in carbon emissions, reduce its coal consumption and stop its support for overseas coal-fired power plants in other Belt and Road Initiative countries. But the talks between the two climate envoys are likely to focus more on tackling methane, which has become a key part of global campaigns to limit global warming to within 1.5 degrees Celsius. In a rare joint declaration with the US in Glasgow two years ago, China, which produces about a fifth of the global total of the potent greenhouse gas, pledged to unveil “a comprehensive and ambitious national action plan on methane” by the end of last year. Despite mounting international pressure, especially from the US, China has yet to unveil such a plan, with Xie admitting last year that China’s ability to control the gas, mainly from coal mines, livestock and rice cultivation, remained “weak”. Li said that while Kerry looked set to pile pressure on China to cut methane emissions, which the US diplomat said had been “front and centre” in his talks with Xie since Glasgow, Beijing was unlikely to budge. “Technically, I don’t think there’s any problem for China to release the emissions-reduction plan. But a key reason why China has yet to do it is precisely because the US side has pushed too hard. China does not want to be seen as bowing to external pressure,” he said. Instead, he said, China might choose to unveil its action plan on methane in the lead-up to the UN General Assembly in September or the COP28 UN climate talks in Dubai in November. More importantly, Kerry is expected to seek to hammer home the Biden administration’s political message about addressing climate cooperation in isolation, according to Li. “I think the most important message for the US side is to separate climate change from the overall political ties, or as Kerry once put it, both sides should ‘find a way to compartmentalise to move forward’,” he said. “There is nothing new about the demands the US side is expected to raise. The only part that is unknown is how China will react this time.” During Kerry’s trip to Tianjin two years ago, then-foreign minister Wang Yi was blunt about US attempts to divorce climate cooperation from other problems. “The US side wants to turn climate cooperation into an ‘oasis’ in China-US relations. But if the oasis is surrounded by desert, it will soon become ‘desertified’,” Wang told Kerry.