China state newspaper Global Times on Sunday called its pro-regime observers “widely pessimistic” and expecting “no concrete progress” as President Joe Biden’s special climate envoy, John Kerry, landed in Beijing for talks to address the alleged climate “crisis.”
The Global Times undermined Kerry’s impact before he held a meeting on Monday with China’s top environmental official, Xie Zhenhua, intended to expand discussions of what the two countries can do together to cut carbon emissions. China has formally vowed to increase its carbon emissions as an “obligation” in the Paris Climate Agreement, which Biden formally rejoined upon becoming president. His predecessor, former President Donald Trump, walked out of the Paris Agreement on the grounds that it was hostile to American enterprise and unfairly distributed climate responsibilities among its signatories.
Kerry’s is the third visit of a high-level American official to Beijing in the past month. Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with genocidal dictator Xi Jinping in late June, as well as China’s top diplomats; the meetings did not result in any policy or other agreements. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen followed with her own visit in early July to discuss trade matters – both Blinken and Yellen emphasized that the Biden administration had no interest in “decoupling” from the volatile, totalitarian Chinese communist economy.
John Kerry has repeatedly claimed that cooperation with China – the world’s worst carbon emitter and a prolific consumer of fossil fuels – is more important than many other diplomatic concerns and urged that America subsidize China’s solar industry, fueled by Uyghur slavery tied to the ongoing genocide of the ethnic group in occupied East Turkistan. China has imprisoned as many as three million Uyghur, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and other non-Han people in concentration camps since 2017, thousands of whom Beijing claimed had “graduated” from the “vocational training centers” (concentration camps) into the Chinese job market. Human rights organizations and journalists have documented the existence of a vibrant, state-sponsored online slave trade selling concentration camp “graduates” into factories nationwide.
“Observers were widely pessimistic that Kerry’s visit will yield any substantial result for climate change cooperation between the two countries,” the article continued, contending the main reason is the fact that “Beijing and Washington disagree on the fundamentals of how to address climate change.”
The main disagreement highlighted is that China’s “fundamentals of how to address climate change” include browbeating the United States into paying poor countries, presumably to decrease their emissions. American officials, instead, note that China is by far the world’s worst polluter. In addition to being the world’s most prolific carbon emitter, China is responsible for prodigious amounts of garbage dumped in both the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. In 2020 – a year during which carbon emissions around the world were reduced as Wuhan coronavirus lockdowns shut down commerce – China built three times the number of coal plants of every other country combined.
China’s dominance of solar panel manufacturing has proven a particular point of dispute due to China’s insistence on using slaves in manufacturing polysilicon, critical for the development of photovoltaic (PV) technology. Reports last year following the implementation of the Uyghur Forced Labor Protection Act (UFLPA) revealed that American companies attempting to import solar panels were struggling to find products from China they could prove were not built by slaves. The UFLPA treats all products from East Turkistan by default as if they were produced by slavery; the burden of proof is on importers to show that the products they wish to bring into America were not manufactured by slaves.
Kerry has been among the Biden administration’s loudest voices demanding an easier path for Chinese solar products into the American market despite slavery concerns.
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Article URL : https://www.breitbart.com/asia/2023/07/17/no-concrete-progress-china-concedes-john-kerry-visit-useless/