While Beijing sees a “rainbow” rising over its drive to surpass America as world leader, President Biden is employing a good-cop, better-cop position on diplomacy.

Secretary Yellen is at Beijing this week, striking an even more conciliatory tone than Secretary Blinken, whose June visit highlighted some disagreements but was nevertheless designed to mend fences.

The next official in line is the climate tsar, John Kerry, who plans to board his private jet in mid-July in an effort to beseech the world’s leading country in terms of pollution to lower its carbon emissions. He will try to forge agreements between what he calls the “two largest emitters.”

No wonder the Chinese Communist leadership is now describing its relations with America as a “rainbow after a period of wind and rain,” as Beijing’s premier, Li Qiang, told reporters following his hour-long meeting Friday with Ms. Yellen.  

Mr. Li referred, perhaps, to the let’s-play-nice message Ms. Yellen brought from Washington. “We seek healthy economic competition that is not winner-take-all but that, with a fair set of rules, can benefit both countries over time,” she said. 

In a readout of her meeting with Mr. Li, the treasury department said the two sides see the importance of “closely communicating on global macroeconomic and financial issues and working together on global challenges, including debt distress in low-income and emerging economies and climate finance.”

Ms. Yellen’s visit follows Beijing’s pique in reaction to Washington-imposed limits on export of semiconductors that could bolster China’s military capabilities. In retaliation, Beijing threatened to ban exports to America of two rare earth minerals that are crucial for electronic devices and vehicles.  

Republicans fear that Mr. Biden’s rush to ease tensions could weaken America’s defenses and compromise principles. “While dialogue is important, Secretary Yellen should not hold back on competitive actions like human rights sanctions and export controls on Huawei,” the House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman, Michael McCaul, told the Washington Post. 

The Biden administration, though, seems eager to back off whenever Beijing invokes the specter of retaliation, even when America has the upper hand. While the Communist regime’s threats are rising, China’s economy is failing to recover from Chairman Xi’s disastrous “zero-Covid” policies.

New housing sales in China dropped by 28.1 percent in June in comparison to the previous year, when the country was under strict lockdowns. New housing sales are widely seen as an indicator of consumers’ confidence in the economic future. Rebounding from dropping housing demand is considered difficult. 

Despite such weaknesses, Washington seems caught in what the chairman of the House’s special committee on China, Mike Gallagher, calls “the retaliation paradox.”

“The more we wring our hands over whether we’re provoking a Marxist-Leninist regime that has no respect for international rules, the more we create incentives for that regime to act ‘provoked’ at the most insignificant slight,” Mr. Gallagher wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. 

Yet, the Biden administration cowers in face of Beijing’s threats and insists on promoting rules-based diplomacy even as Beijing flouts the rules and acts solely according to its interests. 

In his third Beijing visit as Mr. Biden’s top adviser on climate, Mr. Kerry will undoubtedly praise the Communist regime’s dedication to renewable energy, hinting that Beijing is abiding by such pacts as the Paris Climate Accords. China indeed invests heavily in the wind and solar industries, hoping to dominate what it sees as a top future market. At the same time, while America limits oil and gas production, Beijing is deepening its reliance on coal, which is the dirtiest producer of carbon emissions.

“China Energy Investment Corporation, the world’s largest coal-fired power generation giant, said on Friday that it has increased coal production to secure power supply nationwide,” the state-owned news agency, Xinhua, proudly reported Friday. “In the first half of the year, China Energy is estimated to have produced 310 million tonnes of coal, up 4.1 percent year on year.”

A former ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, has made her opposition to Beijing a top issue on the 2024 presidential campaign trail. “Communist China is building up its military, sending fentanyl to America, spying on us, and stealing our information. Meanwhile, Joe Biden is sending his climate czar to play nice with Beijing,” the Republican tweeted Thursday. “Biden’s weakness makes China stronger.”

Mr. Xi has famously vowed to make his Communist regime the leading world power by 2049. While his own policies at times cloud that ambition, American-made  rainbows can indeed be detected over Beijing.