Jeffrey Prescott, Joe Biden aide noted for experience and calm, may become point person on China
- Prescott, a veteran of the National Security Council in the Obama administration, is reportedly in line for that group’s top China or Asia-wide job
- ‘He’s rooted in good values, which, given where we’ve been the past four years, is no small thing,’ says a former boss
As the Biden administration prepares to take the reins in Washington, the stakes have never been higher for the US relationship with China and the rest of Asia. In the latest in a post-US election series, Mark Magnier profiles an adviser who might play a key role on China policy.
A few days before a May 2012 meeting of the US-China Security and Economic Dialogue, Jeffrey Prescott landed at Beijing Capital Airport and headed straight for the embassy. Any thoughts by Prescott, part of the advance team and then a senior adviser to US vice-president Joe Biden, about the grinding negotiations ahead with notoriously tough Chinese counterparts were quickly pushed aside by a more immediate crisis.
The blind activist lawyer Chen Guangcheng had just escaped house arrest in Shandong province and sought asylum in the US embassy, threatening to overshadow bilateral talks on trade, security and human rights involving a 150-member US delegation and six cabinet secretaries. Prescott and colleagues spent days juggling Beijing’s mounting anger, Chen’s shifting moods, human rights concerns and dialogue preparations, with Prescott one of the few from Washington who had lived in China.
“I don’t remember eating or sleeping much,” said Michael Posner, then assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labour and now an ethics and finance professor at New York University. “It was hugely complicated, with meetings at all hours of the day and night, all kinds of distracting noise, and Jeff was very much in the middle of it, calm, principled, smart, his knowledge of China very helpful.
“Sometimes diplomacy involves inconvenient incidents and it was really a moment we were being tested.”
Prescott, 48, could face many more tests in the months ahead. A veteran of the National Security Council (NSC) under president Barack Obama, he is reportedly in line for that group’s top China or Asia-wide job at a time of unprecedented complexity amid a global pandemic and economic downturn.
