Following the March 14 meeting between National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and Chinese Politburo member Yang Jiechi, State Department spokesman Ned Price used his press briefing to issue a series of wild threats against China, portraying the United States as the world power whose orders to respect the “rules-based” global order cannot be ignored or defied. This stood in contrast to a somewhat toned-down White House briefing by an unnamed senior Administration official who limited himself to saying that Jake Sullivan had expressed U.S. concerns about Russian-Chinese “alignment.”
Price arrogantly proclaimed that in his meeting with Yang Jiechi, Sullivan had raised “directly and very clearly our concerns about the PRC’s support to Russia…and the implications that any such support would have for the PRC’s relationship not only with us, but for its relationships around the world. That includes our allies and partners in Europe and in the Indo-Pacific.” The real purpose of the meeting, he said, was to deliver the message that “we are watching very closely the extent to which the PRC, or any other country for that matter, provides any form of support—whether that’s material support, whether that’s economic support, whether that’s financial support to Russia.”
