A day in the life of the US ambassador to China

It is strangely fitting that Nicholas Burns, America’s ambassador in Beijing, began his job at the height of China’s zero-Covid policy. Burns arrived in March 2022 to the sight of a dystopian moonscape. China’s capital was in the midst of a sandstorm. And instead of diplomatic niceties at the airport, the Americans were greeted by dozens of health officials dressed from top to bottom in white hazard suits. No faces were visible. They had to walk through a jetway to rooms wrapped in plastic from floor to ceiling where they were swabbed and tested. They couldn’t understand what people were saying because they were wearing face coverings and heavy protective gear.

“It was like a Chinese version of Blade Runner set in 2022,” says Burns, who recently sat down with me to talk about his job. “It is the strangest environment I’ve ever been in.” For the next 21 days, Burns and his wife, Libby, were quarantined in the ambassador’s residence. They did not see a soul. The staff had to vacate the building. They were not allowed to walk around the compound because of the risk of infecting the security guards. Burns spent his time taking virtual Mandarin classes and holding non-classified Zoom meetings with the embassy staff. All told, he spent 45 days in isolation in his first nine months on the job.

Burns compares his role in China to being America’s ambassador to Moscow at the height of the cold war in the 1950s and 1960s. In this case, however, the pandemic made Burns’ isolation even greater to what the likes of George F Kennan and Chip Bohlen went through. The weirdest twist was the suddenness with which it ended. On December 9 2022, Xi Jinping abruptly switched China from zero-Covid to what was quickly dubbed “Double Covid”. Most restrictions were scrapped. More than a million Chinese died from Covid in the next two months. Eighty per cent of Burns’ embassy staff, which, including families, totals almost a thousand people, contracted Covid. On the upside, they could at least now resume comparatively normal lives.

But is there anything normal about US-China relations nowadays? As a life-long career diplomat — who was a scholar at Harvard’s Kennedy school before Joe Biden tapped him for the ambassadorship — Burns is careful with his phrasing. His Chinese counterparts are unfailingly courteous, he says. Yet there is no disguising the day-to-day tension and high stakes involved in the relationship.

In August 2022, Nancy Pelosi, then Democratic Speaker of the House, made a controversial visit to Taiwan. Her plane landed in Taipei at 10.46pm on August 2. Burns was summoned to the Chinese foreign ministry at 10.45pm. He spent the next three hours listening to the objections of Xie Feng, a senior diplomat, now Burns’ counterpart as China’s ambassador in Washington. Following Pelosi’s visit, Burns was called in on eight different occasions to hear to China’s protests. Each session took between two and four hours. “They protested strenuously and I defended Pelosi’s right to visit Taiwan as the head of a coequal branch of the US government,” says Burns.

His job is made more challenging by the fact that Xi’s grip on the system is greater than any Chinese leader since Mao Zedong in the decades after the revolution. Two Chinese senior officials — its former foreign minister, Qin Gang, and its former defence minister, Li Shangfu — have vanished in the last year. No one is sure where they are. More have been removed on corruption charges. Those in place are far more reluctant to exchange informal titbits with foreign diplomats than their predecessors.

“It is a more repressive time in China than it has been for several decades,” Burns says. “It’s difficult to have off the record conversations that are part of diplomacy. There’s ‘at the table diplomacy’, which is formal. Then there is ‘behind the table diplomacy’ over dinner or a drink. Those times are few and far between.”

He divides his tenure since Covid into two phases. Following “balloongate” in early 2023, US visits to China were cut off for several months. Military communications were also severed. Burns was the only senior US official in regular touch with the Chinese. Then Beijing lifted its embargo. Trips by Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, Janet Yellen, the US treasury secretary, Gina Raimondo, the commerce secretary, and Henry Kissinger in the centenarian’s last visit to China before he died, helped thaw the situation. Following Biden’s meeting with Xi in San Francisco late last year, “mil-to-mil” has resumed and the two governments have set up joint working groups on artificial intelligence, fentanyl and climate change. 

But the people-to-people ties have barely recovered. Before Covid, there were 345 weekly flights between the two countries. Now there are fewer than 100 (at its lowest ebb, there were only a dozen). Likewise, there were 15,000 American students in China in 2020. Now there are 800. Two-way tourism has dropped from the millions to the thousands. The still unexplained stabbings last week of four Iowa exchange teachers in north-east China will certainly not help. “The diplomacy is fairly normal compared to two years ago,” says Burns. “But Covid pulled the two societies apart.” 

Biden’s “align, invest, compete” approach to China means that at one level the relationship is a hive of activity. There are 48 US federal agencies represented in Burns’ embassy, ranging from Food and Drug Administration officials to Wildlife and Fisheries. In contrast to the first cold war, economic and investment ties are deeply intermeshed, notwithstanding Biden’s “de-risking” on US exports of semiconductor technology and AI. At another level, though, the two countries are in what Burns calls “a multigenerational contest for power”.

Unlike the Soviets after the 1962 Cuba crisis, China refuses to discuss anything related to its nuclear weapons programme. Persuading China that it is in China’s own interests to be transparent on its nuclear doctrine and modernisation is one of Burns’ priorities. For the time being, though, China is unresponsive.

“John F Kennedy talked about the ‘long twilight struggle’,” says Burns. “This might be 21st century version of that where we have to compete yet stay engaged so we can drive down probability of a conflict.” At the same time, however, “we are locked into a battle of ideas with Beijing — our democratic values versus their authoritarian mindset. We are waging that here daily in seeking to defend our view of the future.”

It would be fair to say that another pandemic would not help in that quest. Has China taken remedial steps to minimise the risk of another Wuhan-style outbreak, I ask. “I don’t know if it’s possible to make that judgment,” says Burns.

Gideon, you’ve recently been to China. Like me, you’ve also known Nick Burns for many years. How would you rate the difficulty of his job on an ambassadorial scale of one to ten?

Recommended reading 

• My column this week evaluates the appeal of an American Caesar. “Trump would resume office as an American Caesar with a ready-made toolkit of executive actions,” I write. “For those with reading stamina, Project 2025 is the War and Peace of authoritarian planning.”

• My colleague, Katie Martin, also has an incisive piece on why the dollar doomsters have got it all wrong. The greenback’s share of global reserves has only dipped slightly in the past few years, most of it attributable to Russia and Switzerland.

• Do also read Simon Kuper on how the “wrong chaps” have been running Britain. Simon has a new book out, Good Chaps, that will be essential reading for those fascinated by Britain’s self-immolation.

• Finally, Anne Applebaum argues persuasively in the Atlantic that Trump isn’t America’s Le Pen. He’s far worse. Last week’s European parliamentary election were disquieting, particularly in France. But the vote share of right-wing populists fell in many countries, including Spain and Poland. Even where they rose, such as France, their surge cannot be compared to the 50:50 chance Trump will be America’s next president.

• Do read Matthias Matthjis in Foreign Affairs on the EU elections. Contrary to the general impression, the most Cassandra-like predictions of a far-right surge were unfounded, Matthias argues. But it was still a bad result. 

Gideon Rachman responds

Ed, yes I’ve known Nick Burns for a long time. I first got to know him when he was US ambassador to Nato — 20 years ago. He is probably America’s top diplomat, apart from the other Burns, Bill Burns, the director of the CIA, who is doubling up as a de facto second secretary of state.

I think Nick Burns’s job is probably the most difficult he will ever have. Apart from anything — it’s not clear to me what the brief is. Is the US basically now in a second cold war with China — as Burns’ remarks to you about the “long twilight struggle” implies? Or are there still many areas of commercial and diplomatic co-operation? That seems to be what many of America’s leading corporations want. Look at the recent words and actions of Elon Musk or Apple’s Tim Cook. What does Burns actually say to these corporate titans, if and when they swing by the embassy in Beijing. 

One of the things that does worry me is the deterioration in the way that ordinary people in both China and America see each other — which, of course, reflects official rhetoric and media coverage. Bruce Stokes of the German Marshall Fund just put out some new polling that shows that: “Americans negative views of China have never been worse. They are now more negative than after Tiananmen.”

Some 81 per cent of Americans now have a negative view of China — up from 47 per cent in 2017. And, of course, we have just had this sinister incident in China, in which four American college instructors were stabbed while walking in a park. The Chinese authorities have rushed to say that this was an “isolated incident”. We don’t know the full context and the motivations for the attack. But it seems entirely possible that this is linked to the ramping up of anti-American sentiment in China — in the official media and even more among ultranationalist netizens.

That, unfortunately, is the context in which diplomatic pros like Nick Burns have to operate. They may understand that their job is to prevent crises spiralling into conflict. The trouble is that — when the next crisis hits — the leaderships in both Beijing and Washington could find themselves boxed in by the militant atmospheres in both nations.

Your feedback

And now a word from our Swampians . . .

In response to “Bring back patriotism”:

“Boutros Boutros Ghali, a much underestimated secretary-general of the United Nations, once observed that ‘everyone needs a country to love’.

Leopold von Ranke said that the union of all depended on the independence of each’.

If we can hang on to those two adages then your problem of patriotism seeding off into narrow nationalism and xenophobia ought to be just about containable.” — David Howell