Global Courant
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken boards his plane for a trip to Berlin at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, on June 22, 2021.
Andreas Harnik | Swimming Pool | Reuters
BEIJING — U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken will travel to Beijing this weekend for his first trip to China under the Biden administration.
Delayed by more than four months, Blinken’s trip marks a rare high-level meeting between the US and China in a period of heightened tension.
It is expected that little will emerge from the interviews themselves. But Blinken’s visit to Beijing helps pave the way for additional meetings — including a possible one-on-one between US President Joe Biden and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping later this year.
Blinken’s trip to Beijing is a “potentially significant turning point in the relationship,” Scott Kennedy, senior adviser and chairman of the board in Chinese affairs and economics at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told CNBC.
“Simply strengthening communications is a reasonable goal,” he said. “If (both sides) announce that the talks have gone well enough, they can schedule additional cabinet-level meetings.”
Communications and meetings between the US and China have dried up in recent years due to the pandemic and political tensions.
The US State Department said Blinken is meeting with “senior (PRC) officials where he will discuss the importance of maintaining open lines of communication to responsibly manage the US-PRC relationship.”
Blinken “will also address bilateral concerns, global and regional affairs and potential collaboration on shared transnational challenges,” department spokesman Matthew Miller said in a statement.
China’s foreign ministry confirmed the visit, but did not provide details of specific meetings.
Expectations for a significant recovery in the US-China relationship, especially due to Blinken’s upcoming trip, remain low.
“The goal is still to prevent the relationship from deteriorating further, rather than formulating and agreeing to a shared vision for the future,” said Drew Thompson, a former US Department of Defense official and current visiting senior research fellow at Lee Kuan Yew School. of public policy in Singapore.
“The rhetoric of the Biden administration is that we will compete where we can; and collaborate where we need to,” said Thompson. “But China doesn’t see it that way. China sees the political elements of both competition and cooperation, and they are not willing to cooperate if there is still an element of competition or if the US challenges it politically.”
“And so I think the government’s goals are unrealistic at this point because of the way Beijing has shaped its interest in its strategy.”
Rising tensions
Geopolitically, it’s been an intense few months as the world waited for Blinken to reschedule his trip to China – and potentially help stabilize the relationship between the two economic powers.
The US shot down an alleged Chinese spy balloon flying over US airspace in February. Its occurrence had forced Blinken to postpone his trip to Beijing indefinitely at the time. Beijing insisted the balloon was an unnamed weather tracker that had blown off course.
Elsewhere, the CEO of TikTok, owned by Chinese tech giant ByteDance, was put to the test in March in the US Congress over security concerns. China’s foreign ministry said at the time that it will “never” and “never” ask companies to go against local laws and provide data that is located abroad.
“The U.S. government has provided no evidence or evidence that TikTok threatens U.S. national security, but has repeatedly suppressed and attacked the company on the basis of presumption of guilt,” the ministry said, according to a transcript of the briefing.
And in May, China said the US chipmaker microns had failed a security assessment and banned critical infrastructure operators from buying from the company.
“The relationship has not been stable since February,” Kennedy said. But he added that the mood in Washington, D.C., where he lives, “isn’t as dark as it was” in February and March.
Taiwan tensions
“The US must fulfill its commitment to the ‘One China’ policy,” Jia Qingguo, a professor at Peking University, said Tuesday on the sidelines of the Caixin New Asia Vision conference in Singapore.
“China also doesn’t want to see any accidents between the two armies,” Jia added.
It recognizes that while there is a need to put up military guardrails between the two countries, it is not enough. The two countries should also put up similar guardrails for diplomacy and economic relations to avoid confrontation. This will reduce reactive actions and any chance of accidents.”
Among the many other points on which the US and China differ is Russia’s war on Ukraine, which Beijing has refused to label an invasion while calling for peace talks.
Hope for more meetings between the US and China
Nevertheless, the two sides remain each other’s largest trading partners in terms of goods.
Chinese Commerce Minister Wang Wentao met with his US counterpart in Washington in May. And US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is expected to visit China at an unspecified date.
Looking ahead, Xi may visit the US at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Leaders’ Summit, to be held in San Francisco in November.
Jia said expectations for the results of Blinken’s upcoming meetings with the Chinese should not be too high, but it was important that he go.
“It’s not common for two of the world’s greatest powers to rely on the highest levels of leadership to maintain ties. It’s actually quite risky.” said Jia. “That’s why it’s important that both countries have more levels of exchange.”
– CNBC’s Clement Tan contributed to this report.
