New 'China House' chief has hands on hot potato

The US State Department has picked veteran diplomat Mark Lambert as its top China policy official. Lambert will likely be named as the deputy assistant secretary for China, filling the post left in June by Rick Waters.

Waters also served as the head of the Office of China Coordination-informally known as "China House" — a unit the State Department created late last year to meld China policies across regions and issues put forward by different departments.

The China House has faced criticism over its ineffectual handling of China-focused initiatives and low efficiency. Although it remains unknown whether Lambert will assume the China House coordinator title, his appointment is unlikely to change the direction of Washington's China policy featuring "competition" based on de-risking measures to protect national security, or help to improve the performance of the China House either.

It is the Republicans' questioning whether the China House has softened the Joe Biden administration's China policy that has made the appointment of a new leadership of the office a focus of lawmakers in Congress.

That means while the Biden administration hopes the China House can make its China policy more focused on the United States' contentious co-existence with China, the Republicans expect it to make Washington's China policy even tougher.

No matter which side of the bread the office will butter in the future, the founding of the China House itself is nothing but "adding layers of bureaucracy to an already complex decision-making process" as some of its critics say. The State Department has pushed back against such criticism, saying the China House is one of its highest-functioning teams.

However, that the post has been left unoccupied almost two months after Waters quit the job less than one year after his appointment shows the newly founded China House has already become a hot potato in the State Department and an epitome of the wrangling between the two parties, which has set the unstable tone for the US' China policy over the past two years.

As such, even if Lambert, who has rich work experience in East Asia, is appointed to be the director of the office, that will not help streamline the complicated decision-making mechanisms of the US government regarding its China policy, not to mention bridge the gap between the two parties on China-related issues.