It’s not Yang Jiechi, the country’s top foreign policy official, who has been occupying Chinese news and social media since Friday.
It was he who accused American colleagues at length, with a prominent sentence: “The United States is not qualified to speak to China from a position of strength”. They are not stronger.
The Mandarin phrase was hers, but the one who interpreted it in English was Zhang Jing. And it occupies news channels like Feng, newspapers like South China Morning Post and Global Times or the Sina Weibo platform.
In it, according to the What’s on Weibo site, the hashtag with Zhang’s name reached 200 million views as of Sunday, with posts with “This is my idol” and “She has shown her strength too.” . For the SCMP, “she stole the show”.
At the meeting, after the US attacks, Yang responded for 15 minutes without interruption, uttering two thousand words. When Zhang asked if he could translate, he laughed and said it was “a test” (above, on the show). US Secretary of State Antony Blinken says she deserves a raise
Chinese profiles have recovered photos showing that Yang himself, who is from the CCP Politburo, started out as an interpreter for Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s, in conversations with his father George Bush, among others.
NEW NORMAL
In Caixin and the Wall Street Journal, coverage of the meeting was pessimistic, with both warning of the risk that a “miscalculation” could lead to conflict.
The open confrontation is the “new normal”, estimates the Chinese financial manager, and shows that they do not have the same “perception of their balance of power”, estimates the American.
TESLA FROM HUAWEI
At the start of the meeting, the WSJ reported that Beijing would veto the use of American Tesla cars by the military and authorities over fears of a “national security leak.”
The owner of the manufacturer ran to respond, by videoconference with the Chinese government. New headline on WSJ, “Elon Musk Says Tesla Won’t Share Data With US”.
He even defended TikTok, threatened by Washington, but the newspaper says the parallel is drawn with Huawei.
ONE MORE CHANCE
Highlighted Sunday by the New York Times, the United States wasted “a chance to vaccinate the world” by not putting pressure on their pharmacists to “share their know-how”. With that, “Russia and China promise to fill the void,” including Brazil.
But Washington would have another chance, with the announcement that it will “control the patent at the heart” of its vaccines.
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