While U.S. Diplomats Negotiated With China, China Hacked Them

In June, America and China traded hacks.

Secretary of State Blinken traveled to Beijing in a visit that had been delayed for a few months after the public learned that China had been flying a spy balloon over America. After days of “high-level talks”, the Biden administration official claimed that the trip was a success.

“We have made progress and we are moving forward,” the State Department official declared.

Meanwhile, China had been hacking.the State Department. While Secretary of State Blinken and State Department officials prepped for the biggest Chinese diplomatic exchange of the administration, Chinese hackers pulled off an ingenious targeted attack aimed at accessing the emails of State Department and other government officials including Blinken’s own messages.

The Biden administration and China had different definitions of “moving forward”.

Secretary of State Blinken learned that China had tried to hack his emails a day before he was set to visit Beijing, and he chose to go ahead with the trip without making any public mention of it, not wanting to spoil the photo op. The previous scheduling of the trip had been bumped because of China’s spy balloon and Blinken chose to demonstrate to the enemy that no amount of abusive behavior was going to stop the Biden administration’s appeasement.

The Biden administration’s idea of diplomacy was talking to China, while the People’s Republic wanted to know what Blinken and other top officials were going to say before they got there. Besides targeting Blinken and State Department officials, Chinese hackers also came after Commerce Secretary Raimondo and members of her department. That won’t stop Raimondo from visiting China later this year. No Chinese attack or provocation will stop the appeasement.

Secretary of State Blinken turned to the cameras in Beijing and stated that an agreement had been reached that “sustained communication at senior levels is the best way to responsibly manage our differences” even while knowing that China’s idea of sustained communication was trying to get at his emails. China has its own idea of how to “establish better lines of communication” and it begins by hacking the hacks to read their communications.

And the Biden administration’s idea of better communications is to hide what happened.

When an incident spills out into the press, the Biden administration brings out Hillary Clinton’s old ‘reset button’ and announces that diplomatic meetings have made everything right again.

Even though the hack had been made public by Microsoft, the Biden administration has not directly addressed it because that might interfere with its China diplomacy. That is in keeping with its policy of refusing to talk about any Chinese attack that doesn’t happen in broad daylight.

The Biden administration initially refused to take action against China’s spy balloon and covered up reports about it while pleading with the Chinese embassy for answers. Only when photos of the balloon taken by Montana residents went viral did the administration finally shoot it down.

The State Department hadn’t wanted the spy balloon to interfere with Blinken’s trip. Even while it publicly condemned China, it was quietly appeasing it, shutting down export controls and human rights measures as an apology for the public action taken against its spy balloon.

Biden has since dismissed the spy balloon as “unintentional” and “silly” and has spent the spring and summer dispatching his top hacks to plead our case to the Communists in Beijing. The Communist dictatorship turned down a meeting with Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, instead it publicly showed off a simulation in which it destroyed the USS Gerald R. Ford and conducted aggressive intercepts of Navy vessels and Air Force planes. It’s reportedly building up its spy operation in Cuba and may start actually moving troops onto the Communist island.

Rather than address China’s aggression, Biden has kept on sending more emissaries.

The exchange of hacks has been going on all summer with CIA Director Bill Burns making a ‘secret’ trip to China in June to tell the Communist spies about “the importance of maintaining open lines of communication in intelligence channels.” China’s idea of maintaining open lines of communication was to hack the CIA and expose its agents during the Obama administration.

Despite China’s high-profile hacks, the high-profile hacks keep coming. Next up, Climate Envoy John Kerry, the administration’s leading apologist for China, will visit in the middle of July. Instead of advocating for the climate, Kerry has advocated for Chinese slave labor solar panels and argued that none of its crimes, national, international or against us, compare to the grave climate threat from ordinary Americans driving to work or running their air conditioners.

It’s doubtful that China has gone to the trouble of hacking Kerry and his team. Why bother?

The message from all of these visits is that there will be no meaningful consequences. Whatever China does, the Biden administration will keep pursuing “dialogue” to maintain “open communications” to “stabilize the relationship”. And that gives China a green light to attack.

“I think there is a way to resolve, to establish a working relationship with China that benefits them and us,” Biden claimed. China already has a working relationship with us. China attacks us and we try to figure out why it would do such a thing. Spy balloons, military encounters, threats of destruction and hacks are met with diplomatic appeasement. After turning over our economy to the Communist dictatorship, we keep talking about how to fix our relationship.

The stark contrast between America’s idea of diplomacy and China’s idea of diplomacy is that we want dialogue and they want control. The People’s Republic of China is not interested in conversations or relationships, they want to know our bottom lines and anything they can exploit to gain a strategic advantage. That’s why diplomacy with China will always fail.

Generations of Chinese Communist officials came of age reading Mao’s quote that, “politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed.” Americans view diplomacy as a means of bringing nations together, while China’s Communist Party sees it as a zero-sum game. For them to win, we must lose. The more we negotiate with China, the more we lose.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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