Pentagon’s top official on Asia policy, Randall Schriver, quits his post

Randall Schriver, the Pentagon’s leading Asia policy expert and one of the administration’s most vocal critics of Beijing, has resigned, the US Department of Defence announced on Thursday.

Schriver will leave his post as assistant secretary of defence for Indo-Pacific security affairs at the end of the month, citing the toll of his work on his family, department spokesman Jonathan Hoffman said.

“His area of expertise in the Indo-Pacific region is unmatched in the department,” Hoffman said at a press briefing. “And also, given the demands of the job, it requires a significant amount of international travel.”

News of his departure was first reported by Radio Free Asia.

Schriver’s nearly two-year tenure has been marked by his persistent critique of Beijing’s policies and behaviour in the military and security spheres and his view of strategic competition between the US and China as “the defining challenge of our generation”.

In May, Schriver became the first US official to publicly use the term “concentration camps” to describe the mass internment facilities in China’s far west, where the United Nations estimates that up to 1 million Uygurs and members of other ethnic minority groups have been detained and subject to forced indoctrination.