President Joe Biden hosted his first in-person summit with Japanese prime minister Yoshihide Suga last week. In a joint press conference and a joint statement issued at the end of the meeting, the two leaders reaffirmed that the U.S.-Japan alliance is “ironclad” and “unwavering,” and outlined many areas in which the two governments will sustain and even deepen their collaboration on bilateral and multilateral issues.  The meeting was widely recognized as an effort to restore mutual confidence to a relationship that had been subject to former President Donald Trump’s inconsistent and ambivalent attention to Tokyo. 

One of the most interesting aspects of the summit was what was said—either implicitly or explicitly—and not said about China. The joint statement highlighted the U.S. and Japanese “shared vision for a free and open Indo-Pacific” based on their “commitment to universal values and common principles . . . peacefully resolving disputes and to opposing coercion . . . [and] shared norms in the maritime domain, including freedom of navigation and overflight, as enshrined in the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.” All observers, including Beijing, understood these declarations as implicitly referring to China’s challenges to or violations of those principles.

But the joint statement also explicitly acknowledged that Biden and Suga had “exchanged views on the impact of China’s actions on peace and prosperity in the Indo-Pacific region and the world, and shared their concerns over Chinese activities that are inconsistent with the international rules-based order.”  Getting more specific than leaders of the two countries usually do, Biden and Suga stated their opposition to Beijing’s “unilateral attempts to change the status quo in the East China Sea” and their “objections to China’s unlawful maritime claims and activities in the South China Sea.”  Most significantly, they “underscore[d] the importance of peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait and encourage[d] the peaceful resolution of cross-Strait issues.” Finally, they expressed their “serious concerns regarding the human rights situations in Hong Kong” and Xinjiang. 

Predictably, this was all contrary to the wishes of Chinese leaders in Beijing. In a telephone conversation the week before Suga’s visit to Washington, Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi told his Japanese counterpart, Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi, that Toyko should “not get involved in the so-called confrontation between major countries” or be “misled by some countries holding biased views against China”—both obvious references to the United States.  Wang did not mention Taiwan, but he did expound on Beijing’s positions on the East and South China Seas and said China was “opposed to Japan’s interference in China’s internal affairs involving Xinjiang and Hong Kong,” according to official Chinese media reports.

Thus, it is unsurprising that Beijing was harsh in its criticism of the statements issued from the Biden-Suga summit. The Chinese Embassy in Washington expressed China’s “firm opposition,” calling the U.S.-Japan joint statement “an attempt to stoke division and build blocs against other countries” and insisting that “these matters bear on China’s fundamental interests and allow no interference.” Going further, a commentary in the official Chinese news service said that Tokyo’s and Washington’s “audacious attempt to incite confrontation and form an anti-China coalition runs counter to the worldwide aspiration for peace, development and cooperation” and is “doomed to fail” because “any harm to the integrity of China’s territory will face strong backlash from China.” Finally, an editorial in the Global Times—a newspaper run by the Chinese Communist Party—proclaimed that the U.S.-Japan joint statement revealed the “compulsive dominance” Washington has over Tokyo in a “master-servant” relationship, in which Japan has “actively and cautiously catered to” Washington’s “extreme China policy.” Global Times concluded by advising Japan “to stay away from the Taiwan question. It may play diplomatic tricks in other fields, but if it gets involved in the Taiwan issue, it will draw fire upon itself.  The deeper it is embroiled, the bigger the price it will pay.”