Kerry’s China Trip Restores Talks on Climate Change But Falls Short on Agreement

John Kerry, the U.S. special envoy on climate, concluded talks in China that pushed forward the two powers’ tentative effort to reset fraught ties and tested Beijing’s willingness to find common ground on fighting climate change.

Kerry saw a parade of high-level Chinese officials and spent long hours in closed-door meetings with his counterpart during his three days in Beijing. Both sides came away citing a readiness for future discussions on climate change after nearly a year of little contact due to Beijing’s anger with Washington over Taiwan, technology and other issues. 

“We came here to unstick what had been stuck,” Kerry told reporters Wednesday. “And indeed, we did succeed.” 

While both sides agreed to future collaboration, Kerry said, they couldn’t finalize all the details. Nor did he get an audience with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, who instead attended a conference on environmental protection and sent a signal on Beijing’s limits for engagement. 

In remarks to that gathering, Xi reiterated China’s goals to see its climate-warming emissions peak before 2030 and become carbon neutral before 2060. But he underscored that his government would proceed on its own timetable despite pressure from the Biden administration to accelerate the time frame.

“The pathway, pace and the vigor with which to achieve these goals should and must be determined by ourselves, and free from outside interference,” Xi said, according to state media reports.

The Biden administration has marked out climate, along with the global economy and public health, as areas ripe for cooperation with Beijing to offset the U.S. and China’s bare-knuckled rivalry over technology and global primacy. 

In getting Beijing’s assent to talk more, Kerry met the low bar set by Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on their recent trips to Beijing as the two governments resume high-level contacts.

Kerry said he and his Chinese interlocutors were already discussing the next two sets of meetings ahead of the upcoming climate summit in Dubai at the end of the year. Points of further discussion, he said, include new emission goals for 2035 and ways to reduce emissions of methane and other non-carbon dioxide emissions. China’s use of coal, Kerry said, remains a contentious issue.

For this visit, the concrete results are less important than the fact there was sustained, constructive communication, said Michael Davidson, assistant professor at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California, San Diego. 

“It’s a stepping stone to more robust engagement on climate,” Davidson said. Further commitments, he said, could be announced in Dubai or at a potential meeting between Xi and President Biden late this year.

As the world’s two largest greenhouse-gas emitters, Kerry said, the U.S. and China recognize the urgency of tackling climate change as swaths of the U.S., Europe and China experience record heat waves in recent days.

In their meeting Tuesday, Chinese Premier

Republicans and other critics of the Biden administration have been critical of the recent high-level outreach as engaging in empty talk without advancing U.S. interests.

When Kerry appeared before the House Foreign Affairs Committee last week, its chairman, Rep. Michael McCaul (R., Texas), pointed to China’s human-rights abuses and its unwillingness to make bigger cuts in carbon-dioxide emissions.

McCaul also faulted China for keeping its developing country status, as designated by the United Nations, and for insisting that it not be held to the same standards as developed countries, despite being the world’s second largest economy and largest greenhouse gas emitter.

Since taking up the envoy post, Kerry has tried to keep climate issues separate from wider diplomatic disputes between the two countries. He told Chinese officials that he would convey Beijing’s concerns to Washington but wanted to steer clear of contentious issues, including concerns over forced labor in the clean-energy supply chain or rising tensions in the Taiwan Strait. 

He told reporters that he hopes “nothing will get in the way of us dealing with the climate crisis.”  

In contrast, Chinese officials have seen Kerry as a way to reach Biden and leverage administration interest in climate change to influence U.S. policy.

China’s top foreign-policy official, Wang Yi, told Kerry during their meeting Tuesday that the climate issue couldn’t be detached from the overall state of bilateral relations. 

Wang also called Kerry “an old friend”—a reference to their overlapping past tenures as their countries’ foreign ministers. 

Kerry’s overall smooth interactions with Chinese interlocutors during his trip will only confirm his critics’ views that he is soft on China, said Ilaria Mazzocco, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington, D.C., think tank. 

Competition over clean-energy technology, such as solar panels and batteries, as well as the critical minerals necessary to produce them, might further narrow the space for cooperation, said Mazzocco. 

“This may make it even harder to delink climate from other issues in the relationship,” she said.

Cooperating on climate change had been a rare bright spot in the testy relationship between the countries. Kerry’s counterpart Xie Zhenhua told Chinese reporters Monday that he and Kerry had spoken to one another 53 times since their respective appointments in early 2021.

Those frequent interactions ground to a halt after then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan last year over Beijing’s vehement objections. The talks resumed again three months later on the sidelines of a global climate gathering in Egypt but were derailed again earlier this year, when Xie suffered a stroke and a suspected Chinese spy balloon drifted across the U.S. 

Write to Sha Hua at [email protected]