The Trump administration is ensuring that known faces are at the helm of key Asian embassies as ambassador-designates await Senate confirmation.
The State Department on Monday confirmed that Anny Vu, the political section chief at the American Institute in Taipei, will be relocated to Beijing to serve as the charge d’affaires ad interim until former Sen. David Perdue is confirmed as the new ambassador. The move was first reported by Reuters.
A charge d’affaires is a diplomat who serves as an embassy’s chief of mission in the absence of the ambassador. It is typically doubled by the deputy chief of mission, the embassy’s No. 2.
Vu, who served multiple times on President Donald Trump’s National Security Council in his first term, will lead the 1,300-staff embassy in Beijing, as well as the four consulates in China.
She will outrank Deputy Chief of Mission Sarah Beran, who joined the Foreign Service five years prior to Vu.
While multiple incumbent and retired State Department officials gave high praise to Vu, with some calling her “one of America’s finest A-tier diplomats” and “an exceptional diplomat and policy hand,” the move is widely seen as an attempt to sideline officials who were closely associated with former President Joe Biden.
Beran served as NSC senior director for China and Taiwan affairs during the Biden years and had just moved to Beijing in January to assume the No. 2 position.
Over in Japan, Joseph Young, who was the embassy’s No. 2 during the first Trump administration, has returned to Tokyo to be charge d’affaires ad interim as of Feb. 9. He outranks Katherine Monahan, the current deputy chief of mission, who served on Biden’s NSC as director for East Asia.
In South Korea, Joseph Yun, a veteran diplomat who served as U.S. Special Representative for North Korea Policy during the Trump first term, is servingas charge d’affaires, above Deputy Chief of Mission Joy Sakurai.
The deployment of charges d’affaires in Beijing, Tokyo and Seoul stands in contrast to, say, the embassy in Singapore, where Deputy Chief of Mission Casey Mace assumed the role of charge d’affaires on Jan. 21, one day after Trump’s second inauguration. Mace served on the NSC from 2017 as the principal Southeast Asia adviser to Trump.
In India, Deputy Chief of Mission Jorgan Andrews has been made charge d’affaires. Andrews, a career foreign service officer, served as a State Department fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace during the Biden years and was not associated with the NSC.
The effort to remove Biden’s footprints is not limited to personnel but extends to terminology. The State Department has revised the fact sheets for relations with China and Taiwan, removing the phrase “People’s Republic of China (PRC)” to describe China and dropping a sentence that states the U.S. does not support independence from the Taiwan page.
In the Group of Seven foreign ministers’ statement issued last Friday after their meeting in Charlevoix, Canada, the nations did not state that “there is no change” in the basic positions on Taiwan, nor did they reaffirm their “one China” policies. Such wording was used in the past two G7 summits in Apulia, Italy, and Hiroshima, Japan.
