US ambassador says China is aligned with ‘agents of disorder’

BEIJING — The United States ambassador to China, R. Nicholas Burns, said the Biden administration is making a last push to try to persuade China to stop transferring equipment to Russia for the war in Ukraine.

Burns, in an interview at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, asserted that nearly 400 Chinese companies have supplied Russia with so-called dual use products, those with both military and commercial applications. He also said China has supplied 90% of the microelectronics used in the Russian war effort.

With less than two weeks remaining before President-elect Donald Trump takes office, Burns is raising the administration’s concerns about Russia, as well as China’s alignment with Iran and North Korea, with Chinese ministers in a series of meetings this week and early next week. He leaves the country Tuesday.

More broadly, Burns said that China’s policies toward Russia, Iran and North Korea were inconsistent with Beijing’s desire to play a leading role in international initiatives of global order, like the World Trade Organization and the Paris Agreement on climate change.

“Their actions are disruptive because they’re aligning themselves with the most unreliable agents of disorder in the international system,” he said. “So the Chinese can’t have it both ways; they’ve got to make a decision here.”

He also said that China, which buys huge quantities of oil from Iran, should use its influence to insist that Iran stop the Tehran-backed Houthi militia from attacking commercial shipping in the Red Sea.

Burns met this week with senior officials including Ma Zhaoxu, the executive vice foreign minister, and Liu Jianchao, who runs the international department of the Chinese Communist Party and is expected to become the next foreign minister. He has more meetings next week.

In a statement on Friday, the spokesperson’s office of China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that China had favored peace talks and a ceasefire in the Ukraine war and had taken a responsible stance on weapons trade. The statement did not address the contention of Ukraine and Western countries that any peace agreement should include a Russian withdrawal from occupied Ukrainian territories.

“China takes a prudent attitude toward military exports and strictly controls the export of dual-use items,” the statement said. “We advise the United States to stop adding fuel to the fire and shifting the blame, and to reflect on its own role in the Ukraine crisis, and do something practical for a political solution to this crisis,” it said.

The statement rejected Burns’ assertion that China had not done enough to make the Red Sea safe for commercial navigation. “Since the situation in the Red Sea has heated up, China has been playing an active role in easing tensions and will continue to do so in the future,” it said.

Chinese officials have taken the position that while the West has imposed sanctions on oil sales by Iran because of its nuclear weapons development program, the United Nations has not done so. So China has felt no legal obligation to avoid buying Iranian oil, which sells at a steep discount to world prices because other countries shun it.

China has quadrupled imports of Iranian oil in the nearly two years since brokering Iran’s peace deal with Saudi Arabia, and last year it bought more than 90% of Iran’s oil exports, according to Kpler, a firm in Vienna that specializes in tracking Iran’s oil shipments. Oil sales to China by Iran’s state-owned oil sector represent more than 5% of the entire Iranian economy, and they pay for much of the operations of the Iranian government.

Iran has experienced a series of setbacks, including an Israeli air raid against Tehran’s air defenses and the defeat by Israel of Iran’s main ally in Lebanon, Hezbollah. China responded by sending one of its four vice premiers, Zhang Guoqing, to meet President Masoud Pezeshkian of Iran in Tehran last month.

“China supports Iran in safeguarding its national sovereignty, security, territorial integrity, and its legitimate rights and interests,” Zhang said in Tehran.

The U.S. Treasury Department announced on Friday that it had expanded its blacklist of tankers and other ships that have carried Russian oil to 183 vessels. Some of these vessels also carry Iranian oil, the Treasury Department said. China has already begun barring vessels blacklisted by the United States from some of its ports this month.

Andon Pavlov, a senior analyst at Kpler, said that the blacklisting of vessels could stop 35% of Iran’s oil exports to China if strongly enforced.

Burns’ discussions with senior Chinese officials this week and next are part of a broader recent diplomatic effort by the Biden administration. In November, President Joe Biden met with Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, at a conference in Peru, and in August, Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, met with Xi in Beijing.

While Burns declined to predict possible Trump administration policies toward China, he said that communication between the two countries’ militaries to prevent accidental confrontations had improved. And in October, for the first time in 13 years, China allowed the recovery of the remains of World War II-era American military personnel missing in action.

He also praised China’s recent actions to limit exports of chemicals used to make fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid that has been the main cause of drug overdose deaths in the United States. China has arrested 300 people in the fentanyl industry, closed many online stores selling the precursor chemicals to produce fentanyl, and banned the export of 55 precursor chemicals and synthetic drugs, Burns said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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