The United States ambassador to China, R. Nicholas Burns, said the Biden administration is making a last push to try to persuade China to stop transferring equipment to Russia for the war in Ukraine.
Mr. Burns, in an interview at the U.S. embassy in Beijing, asserted that nearly 400 Chinese companies have supplied Russia with so-called dual use products, those with both military and commercial applications. He also said China has supplied 90 percent of the microelectronics used in the Russian war effort.
With less than two weeks remaining before President-elect Donald J. Trump takes office, Mr. Burns is raising the administration’s concerns about Russia, as well as China’s alignment with Iran and North Korea, with Chinese ministers in a series of meetings this week and early next week. He leaves the country this coming Tuesday.
More broadly, Mr. Burns said that China’s policies toward Russia, Iran and North Korea were inconsistent with Beijing’s desire to play a leading role in international initiatives of global order, like the World Trade Organization and the Paris agreement on climate change.
“Their actions are disruptive because they’re aligning themselves with the most unreliable agents of disorder in the international system,” he said. “So the Chinese can’t have it both ways; they’ve got to make a decision here.”
He also said that China, which buys huge quantities of oil from Iran, should use its influence to insist that Iran stop the Tehran-backed Houthi militia from attacking commercial shipping in the Red Sea.
Mr. Burns met this week with senior officials including Ma Zhaoxu, the executive vice foreign minister, and Liu Jianchao, who runs the international department of the Chinese Communist Party and is expected to become the next foreign minister. He has more meetings next week.
China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs had no immediate response. But in recent news briefings, Chinese officials have denied supplying Russia or Ukraine with any dual-use products, like drones with military uses.
“China never provides weapons to the parties to the conflict and strictly controls the export of dual-use articles, and China’s scope and measures of export control over drones are the most stringent worldwide,” Lin Jian, a foreign ministry spokesman, said on Dec. 17.
Chinese officials have also taken the position that while the West has imposed sanctions on oil sales by Iran because of its nuclear weapons development program, the United Nations has not done so. So China has felt no legal obligation to avoid buying Iranian oil, which sells at a steep discount to world prices because other countries shun it.
China has quadrupled imports of Iranian oil in the nearly two years since brokering Iran’s peace deal with Saudi Arabia, and last year it bought more than 90 percent of Iran’s oil exports, according to Kpler, a firm in Vienna that specializes in tracking Iran’s oil shipments. Oil sales to China by Iran’s state-owned oil sector represent more than 5 percent of the entire Iranian economy, and they pay for much of the operations of the Iranian government.
Iran has experienced a series of setbacks, including an Israeli air raid against Tehran’s air defenses and the defeat by Israel of Iran’s main ally in Lebanon, Hezbollah. China responded by sending one of its four vice premiers, Zhang Guoqing, to meet President Masoud Pezeshkian of Iran in Tehran last month.
“China supports Iran in safeguarding its national sovereignty, security, territorial integrity and its legitimate rights and interests,” Mr. Zhang said in Tehran.
Andon Pavlov, a senior analyst at Kpler, said Thursday that the Biden administration is expected to expand its blacklist of tankers that have carried Russian or Iranian oil, and that China is likely to bar these vessels from its ports. Reuters reported this week that officials in Shandong Province, the main Chinese entry point for Iranian oil, have begun barring blacklisted tankers from its ports.
But Mr. Pavlov said that Iran’s methods for shipping oil to China are so opaque that it is hard to predict the effectiveness of such measures.
Mr. Burns’s discussions with senior Chinese officials this week and next are part of a broader recent diplomatic effort by the Biden administration. In November, President Biden met with Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, at a conference in Peru, and in August, Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, met with Mr. Xi in Beijing.
While Mr. Burns declined to predict possible Trump administration policies toward China, he said that communication between the two countries’ militaries to prevent accidental confrontations had improved. And last October, for the first time in 13 years, China allowed the recovery of the remains of World War II-era American military personnel missing in action.
He also praised China’s recent actions to limit exports of chemicals used to make fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid that has been the main cause of drug overdose deaths in the United States. China has arrested 300 people in the fentanyl industry, closed many online stores selling the precursor chemicals to produce fentanyl, and banned the export of 55 precursor chemicals and synthetic drugs, Mr. Burns said.
Li You contributed research.