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**JULY 10, 2023**

Kuttner on TAP

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**** Ambassador Yellen

Her trip to China softened rhetoric but changed nothing.

Janet Yellen's mission to Beijing had progressives a little worried.
She is among the most naïve free-marketeers in Biden's Cabinet, and
she has foolishly criticized Biden's strategic tariffs on Chinese
exports as anti-consumer. Her expertise is in finance, not diplomacy,
even less so on China.

But National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan is firmly in control of
China policy. Though Yellen, as a relative dove, was dispatched to
Beijing bearing olive branches, she stuck to the script and gave away
nothing except some soothing words. The essence of the conflict between
the U.S. and China is unchanged, as well as the strategic connection
between Biden's China policy and his industrial and supply chain
policies.

Indeed, Yellen's opening speech on Friday was a pleasant surprise. She
chose as her venue and audience the American Chamber of Commerce in
China, and put her Chinese hosts on the defensive by criticizing all the
ways that the regime hobbles American companies doing business in China.

"During meetings with my counterparts," Yellen said, "I am communicating
the concerns that I've heard from the U.S. business
community-including China's use of nonmarket tools like expanded
subsidies for its state-owned enterprises and domestic firms, as well as
barriers to market access for foreign firms."

After ten hours of meetings with various Chinese officials over the
weekend, Yellen's closing remarks at a Sunday press conference were
deliberately soothing. "President Biden and I do not see the
relationship between the U.S. and China through the frame of great-power
conflict," Yellen said. "We believe that the world is big enough for
both of our countries to thrive."

The trajectory of her dual role of bad cop, then nice cop, did not just
happen. It was carefully choreographed.

Yellen also rejected the idea of a U.S.-China "decoupling," a vague,
straw-man term that no serious person has proposed. In the conventional
wisdom, the Chinese leadership is very sensitive to terminology. They
are also not fools. Beijing must realize that despite a mutual desire to
avoid military conflict, the substance of Biden's China policy is
unchanged.

That message has been delivered repeatedly by Biden's real diplomats
and China experts. Yellen's visit was mainly for public consumption,
and of course the press played right along.

Yellen deserves some (faint) praise for not mixing the message or
undercutting her president, as she has occasionally done in Washington.

Back in her lane, Yellen did another good deed. In a Sunday interview
with

**Face the Nation**
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she warned that while the economy is strong, the risk of recession "is
not completely off the table," but added that the economy is nicely on
track to moderate job growth and subsiding inflation. That message is
directed squarely at the fanatics at the Fed, who need to relent and let
the recovery thrive.

~ ROBERT KUTTNER

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