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My entire life I knew that the United States was not perfect because of the Vietnam War and Watergate during my teenage years, and I knew that race i… - R. Nicholas Burns
" "My entire life I knew that the United States was not perfect because of the Vietnam War and Watergate during my teenage years, and I knew that race in particular was a curse on our history. We had never gotten race right since the first slave ship arrived in Virginia in 1619. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and others have said that this is our original sin, of America itself, of our Constitution, which did not give African Americans, as you well know, full citizenship rights; nothing even close to it. But I feel now that America cannot be successful in its foreign and defense policy if we don’t heal and repair America at home. I’ve never felt that more strongly than I do right now.
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About R. Nicholas Burns
Robert Nicholas Burns (born January 28, 1956) is an American diplomat and academic who has served as the United States ambassador to China from 2022 to 2025. Burns has had a 25-year career in the State Department, and served as United States Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs and the United States ambassador to Greece. As under secretary, he oversaw the bureaus responsible for U.S. policy in each region of the world and served in the senior career Foreign Service position at the department. He retired on April 30, 2008. He was a visiting scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in summer 2008. Burns was a professor of diplomacy and international politics at the Harvard Kennedy School at Harvard University and a member of the Board of Directors of the school's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.
Also Known As
Alternative Names:
Richard Nicholas Burns
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Robert Nicholas Burns
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Nicholas Burns
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Additional quotes by R. Nicholas Burns
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.
You know, most of the major differences in the relationship have not been bridged. But the only way you can bridge them or manage the differences, because sometimes differences cannot be bridged. Our differences with China over Taiwan are not going to be easily bridged, but can we manage the differences in such a way that we are frank with each other? We in the United States defend our position as we have to do, but we don’t descend into conflict. That I think is the key test of diplomacy, and that’s what animates the men and women of our U.S. mission here in China.
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