R. Nicholas Burns Quotes

We think we have about 290,000 Chinese students in the United States. The United States remains the leading destination for Chinese students. We just had a major fair here two weeks ago at the Embassy on a Saturday for Chinese students and their parents to familiarize themselves with the visa process, and also, most importantly, educational opportunities in the United States. Our doors are open to Chinese students. We want Chinese students to study in our country.

I was an American diplomat for twenty-seven years and I wouldn’t trade a day of that career for anything. It was an extraordinary experience to serve our country and to live overseas with my family in five different diplomatic posts.

The United States is disappointed that China continues to provide political and diplomatic support to Moscow’s fundamental break with the United Nations Charter two years ago in its brutal, illegal invasion of Ukraine. We are disappointed the state-controlled press here blames NATO and the European Union for this war. The blame is squarely on the shoulders of one man in the Kremlin. We are very concerned by the actions of Chinese companies that fuel Russia’s defense industrial complex. We have raised those concerns quite recently in the last two to three weeks with our Chinese counterparts. China’s silence on the existential issue of Ukraine’s sovereignty and independence is deafening. And its support to Russia is very troubling indeed.

We need a president and secretary of state who will value diplomacy. Really. And we need a president and secretary of state and a Congress that will embrace the fact that most of the big challenges ahead of us are not going to lend themselves to the use of military power, but to the need to build coalitions and strengthen alliances to fight common global problems, such as future pandemics, climate change, or trafficking of women and children.

Some people are saying, 'Well, we're so competitive with China, we should end the economic relationship'. Well, the consequence of that would be 750,000 American families wouldn't be able to put dinner on the table.

The United States is, in many ways, the linchpin of NATO. It’s true, NATO is an alliance of equals, a collective defense alliance, and a political organization. But the United States, by virtue of its size and power, has always been the leader of the alliance.

One of the motivations for the CHIPS [Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors] and Science Act is to make sure that we’re not only competitive in semiconductors, but that we actually have fabs in the United States that are world class. So that in a crisis, semiconductors – which are the building blocks of everything in a 21st century economy – are closer to home. The Chinese, I think in a way, have also learned that lesson, as I look at what the government here is trying to do. They’re trying to alter supply chains, they’re trying to insulate themselves, hypothetically, from pressure from the rest of the world in the future.

We certainly cannot trust the Chinese. Our responsibility is to make Taiwan a tough nut to crack.

China and the US have a joint interest as well as a global responsibility, to work together on transnational challenges – such as climate change, global macroeconomic stability including debt relief, health security, and global food security.

I defended the speaker [ Nancy Pelosi ]. I defended her right to travel to Taiwan. I defended the peace and stability that we’ve had in the Taiwan Strait for nearly six decades.

I think there’s a lot of concern around the world that China has now become an agent of instability in the Taiwan Strait and that’s not in anyone’s interest.

This is a unique position to be American Ambassador in China at this time, given the complexities in our relationship. When President Biden called me to ask me to take the job, of course I accepted, because, as a career diplomat… I think it’s one of the great challenges that we face around the world these days. We have a very large and very competent Mission here filled with people who are experts on every aspect of the relationship. So I take it as my job to help people in our Mission succeed, to be working on the issues that are critical to the future of our country, such as our very competitive relationship, the military competition between us in the Indo-Pacific, and the building up of our very important alliances with Japan, South Korea, Australia; our defense alliances and treaty agreements with the Philippines and Thailand; our strategic relationship with India.

Well, I wish we lived in a world where I could sit down in front of Chinese CCTV and say what I wanted to and not have that edited or distorted by the state-controlled press. I mean, the reality is when you deal with the state-controlled press here, they often will completely fail to report any kind of constructive criticism, and they’ll only report when you say something positive. That’s not true of Chinese diplomats in the United States. They can write op-eds in the Washington Post, which nobody edits. And that’s part of the problem we face here.

The Biden administration encourages all of the Embassies to take part in the international debate… We have an embassy Weibo account, we have WeChat accounts, we have a Twitter account of 1.2 million followers, I have my own separate Twitter account. What we’re trying to do here is speak to the Chinese people and give them accurate information about us. We try to give the Chinese people an accurate portrayal of who we are as a country, what we believe in, and correct basic misstatements by their own government about us. There’s a powerful censorship body here. When Secretary Blinken gave his big speech on the US-China relationship, the major speech of this administration, it was censored on WeChat and Weibo within two hours. We put it back up a couple of days later and it was censored within 20 minutes. But in that two-hour span, and in that 20-minute span, you can get a lot of people looking at it. We believe in freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and we think that people have a right to free and accurate information. That’s our goal, and to show respect to the people of China, respect for their culture, and their civilization, their history.There are times we use our social media presence to debate the government here, to correct misstatements by the government, to criticize. So, I think we’re never going to live in a world where social media is not a presence.

China is contesting the American-led democratic alliance system in East Asia. It’s contesting it militarily in the South and East China Seas. It’s contesting it via the development of a blue water navy and ballistic missiles, trying to push the American carrier task forces way out beyond the first island chain in the western Pacific. We cannot afford, and we should never accept, being dominated militarily by China in the Indo-Pacific. We’ve got to hold our position. No one wants to fight China, but we have an absolute right— working with Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Japan, India, Singapore, and Vietnam—to make sure that the Chinese are respecting the rule of law, maritime transit, and the sovereign territorial rights of other countries in that region.