New U.S. Secretary of State Nicholas Burns has arrived to start his new post in Beijing amid the escalating tensions between China and the United States over Taiwan, human rights, trade, and the conflict in Ukraine.
BEIJING (A.P.) — New U.S. Secretary of State Nicholas Burns has arrived to start his new post in Beijing amid tensions in the region between China and America. The United States over Taiwan, human rights, trade, and the conflict in Ukraine.
Burns arrived in Beijing on Friday alongside his spouse Libby and a number comprising additional U.S. diplomats and their families. They will be subject to 3 weeks of quarantine in his residence, as China needs an official from the U.S. Embassy spokesperson.
During his quarantine, the ambassador will be able to visit his U.S. Mission staff virtually, the spokesperson added.
The post had been vacant for a while since Terry Branstad departed in October 2020.
Burns is a professional diplomat, Former State Department spokesperson, ambassador to NATO, and an eminent academic who has taught most recently in the Harvard Kennedy School and served as a foreign policy advisor to Joe Biden’s presidential campaign.
Two countries compete for supremacy. U.S. and China are thought to be the top geopolitical rivals, especially within the Indo-Pacific region, where China’s rising influence in the military and economy is in direct competition with U.S. dominance.
Although the Biden administration says it is looking to have a more stable and stable relationship with China, it has maintained its more hefty taxes on Chinese imports that were imposed by the former president Donald Trump and continued a trend of closer ties with Taiwan, the autonomous island China declares as a separate province.
Recently, China was irked by the U.S.-led diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics in protest about human rights violations, specifically the mass detention and the mistreatment of Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities living in the region northwestern of Xinjiang.
China has been unable to condemn Russia for its brutal assault on Ukraine while blaming China and the U.S. for instigating the conflict through inciting NATO expansion and refusing to address Russia’s security concerns.
Burns’ nomination became involved in these issues after Republican Senator. In November, Marco Rubio of Florida declared that he’d put his nomination on hold to pressure Biden to sign bipartisan legislation that he co-authored prohibiting products produced with Uyghur forcible labor from the west of China.
