: China Sees Opportunity After America’s Withdrawal From Afghanistan. But Can Beijing Do Any Better? #WorldNEWS The speed of the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan has been a surprise; China’s

China Sees Opportunity After America’s Withdrawal From Afghanistan. But Can Beijing Do Any Better? #WorldNEWS
The speed of the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan has been a surprise; China’s reaction to the “U. S. humiliation” anything but.
As the Aug. 31 deadline for U. S. troops to leave the nation approaches, with thousands of Afghans and foreign nationals still desperately trying to board evacuation planes amid bloody terrorist attacks, Beijing’s official media has been pointing fingers.
“The disaster in Afghanistan was caused by the U. S. and its allies,” said the state-run Global Times, whose editor tweeted a photo of calm scenes around the Chinese embassy in Kabul while the U. S. legation was overrun. “Death, bloodshed and a tremendous humanitarian tragedy are what the United States has truly left behind in Afghanistan,” said state news wire Xinhua.
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China did not oppose the U. S. -led invasion in 2001. In fact, Beijing backed U. N. Security Council resolutions that endorsed international efforts to oust the Afghan Taliban, with then President Jiang Zemin concerned about Al Qaeda militants spilling over its shared border into restive Xinjiang province. Just days after the Taliban fell, in December 2001, China sent a Foreign Ministry delegation to Kabul with a message of congratulations for new President Hamid Karzai, whom Jiang hosted in Beijing a month later.
But this is now being overlooked as state media portrays the present Taliban as a more moderate group than the one ousted in 2001—even attempting to characterize it as primarily an anti-American one. The Communist Party Peoples Daily flatteringly credited the Talibans victory to its supposed adoption of Mao Zedong’s “people’s war” tactic: rallying the support of the rural population, while drawing the enemy deep into the countryside.
Read more: An Afghan Teacher on How the World Can Protect Girls From the Taliban
“Among the Chinese population, there is actually pretty strong admiration of the Taliban this time around,” Sun Yun, director of the China Program at the Stimson Center, told a recent meeting of the Shanghai Foreign Correspondents Club.
Ever the pragmatist, Beijing has always maintained links with the Taliban regardless of who was in power in Kabul. In 2000, before 9/11 stunned the world, China’s ambassador to Pakistan met with then Taliban chief, Mullah Omar, in one of the hardliners only meetings with foreign diplomats. In 2015, China hosted negotiations between the Taliban and Afghan officials in Xinjiangs capital Urumqi, with a Taliban delegation visiting Beijing four years later.
Last month, with a Taliban takeover looking increasingly obvious, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi received a nine-strong Taliban delegation in China’s northeastern port city of Tianjin, including group number two Abdul Ghani Baradar.