Rahm Emanuel, the U.S. ambassador to Japan, has reportedly been told by the White House to stop insulting China on social media.
Emanuel has recently taken to social media in his official capacity as ambassador to ridicule China over matters of internal politics and the troubled state of segments of its economy.
“President Xi’s cabinet lineup is now resembling Agatha Christie’s novel And Then There Were None. First, Foreign Minister Qin Gang goes missing, then the Rocket Force commanders go missing, and now Defense Minister Li Shangfu hasn’t been seen in public for two weeks,” Emanuel wrote on X on September 7 in one example.
The fate of the two Chinese officials has been the subject of rumors since they disappeared from public view in the past two months. In the case of Qin, The Wall Street Journal reported that he was being investigated for allegedly having an affair with a woman who bore him a child while he served as ambassador to the U.S.
Chinese Communist Party leaders view him as a security risk, per the WSJ.
“Who’s going to win this unemployment race? China’s youth or Xi’s cabinet?” Emanuel teased in the same post, comparing the ministers’ job security with the youth employment crisis currently impacting the Chinese economy.
Chinese officials have asked the ambassador, who formerly served as Obama’s chief of staff and Chicago’s mayor, to back off, NBC News reported.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration has been trying to court China back into the Western fold. Several high-profile clashes involving the U.S. and China in recent years — from blame for the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic during the Trump administration to the more recent spy balloon episode — have pushed China closer to Russia even as the West exerts efforts to isolate Putin in the wake of his invasion of Ukraine.
As reported by NBC News, President Biden has noticeably changed his tone when discussing the U.S.’s largest economic rival. He has emphasized the respect his administration has for China, appearing to reframe the differences between the two world powers as imminently resolvable.
The U.S. is “ready to work together with China on issues where progress hinges on our common efforts,” Biden said during his address to a United Nations General Assembly that would normally feature heads of state of all the powerful veto-holding nations, but which China’s President Xi Jinping did not attend.
“We seek to responsibly manage the competition between our countries so it does not tip into conflict,” Biden claimed.
A spokesperson for Emanuel denied that the ambassador had been told to refrain from publicly criticizing Chinese leadership by the White House, per NBC News.
Kurt Campbell, deputy assistant to the president and coordinator for the Indo-Pacific, was entirely laudatory when asked about Emanuel.
“Ambassador Emanuel is serving with distinction as an uncommonly effective representative of the United States in Japan. Every day his inventiveness, passion and relentlessness are on full display,” he said, adding, “This guy is a superstar and when you put Rahm on the field you get the full Rahm.”
However, Campbell did not say whether the ambassador would continue posting online about China’s leadership, per NBC News.