Chinese foreign guru Yang Jiechi on rise for year of the tiger

The diplomatic face of President Xi Jinping’s new era China will be a familiar one: Yang Jiechi.

Julie Bishop meets Yang Jiechi in Beijing in 2014. Picture: Sanghee Liu

The diplomatic face of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s new era will be a familiar one: Yang ­Jiechi, who rose to prominence befriending American Republican royalty.

He built an intimate relationship with both Bush presidents.

Wide-ranging personnel promotions and demotions are starting to be revealed following the communist party congress that concluded last week.

Mr Yang has been elevated to the 25-member politburo, is director of the leading small group on foreign affairs that advises Mr Xi directly, and is already a state councillor.

It is rumoured that at the National People’s ­Congress in March Mr Yang may become the first vice-premier to be handed exclusive responsibilities for international issues. This would reflect the far greater ­attention paid to foreign affairs by Mr Xi, who travels frequently, generally seeking to supplant the US as the prime international mover as Donald Trump pulls Washington back.

Mr Yang, 67, is senior to Foreign Minister Wang Yi, thus a crucial figure for Canberra.

He was China’s youngest ambassador to the US when he took the job in 2001. George Bush Sr nicknamed him “Tiger Yang” because he was born in the year of the tiger and the Chinese character for his name includes a subtle variant on hu, the word for tiger. Early in his career, he accompanied Mr Bush on a visit to Tibet.

He worked shuttle diplomacy to resolve the crisis when early in George W. Bush’s first term a US spy plane collided with a Chinese fighter over the South China Sea.

Born in Shanghai, Mr Yang graduated from the Foreign Language School as the Cultural Revolution was closing down educational opportunities. The thawing of relations with the US in 1972 — with many countries including Australia following suit — drove then premier Zhou Enlai to seek to boost foreign-language expertise in the Foreign Ministry. Mr Yang was one of the promising students sent to learn overseas, attending the University of Bath and the London School of Economics. He began his foreign ministry career as an interpreter.

At a meeting with Australians in Zhongnanhai, the party-state headquarters in Beijing, which as protocol dictates was being conducted in Chinese and translated into English, Mr Yang suggested as time was running short the rest of the discussion should take place in one language and continued in impeccable, British-­accented English.

He has visited Australia at least twice, in 2008 as foreign minister, and then in 2014 accompanying Mr Xi.

Yang Xuelan, a leader of the Chinese community in the US where Mr Yang lived for about 12 years, says he knows how to personalise relations. “He is open-minded and is willing to see things from the perspective of the person to whom he is talking,” said the community leader.

But Mr Yang’s patience evaporated at an Association of Southeast Asian Nations forum in 2010, when he said to Southeast Asian foreign ministers growing irritated with Beijing’s position on the South China Sea: “There is one basic difference among us. China is a big state, and you are smaller countries.”

In contrast, he led China’s team in three rounds of talks with India about this year’s ­Doklam border incident in the Himalayas, which resulted in a dangerous military confrontation being defused.

Mr Yang was the first senior Chinese official to meet Mr Trump after his inauguration in January. He was said to be the figure who did most to set up the April summit between Mr Trump and Mr Xi in Florida, and is heavily involved in the planning for the visit next week of Mr Trump to Beijing.