Blinken visit to Beijing

I write this brief overview after Secretary of State Anthony Blinken completed his two-day long visit to Beijing. His visit had been postponed after the Chinese sent a heavily equipped balloon over the northern areas of the United States. The Pentagon closely followed the balloon as it traveled across the United States and shot it down once it had left land and had gone over to the sea. There was a lot of to-and-fro discussions before the Secretary of State agreed to travel to the Chinese capital. While in Beijing, he stayed at the Diaoyutai, the Chinese official guest house, which decades earlier had hosted President Richard Nixon when the American leader met with Chairman Mao Zedong.

Blinken arrived early on the morning of Sunday, June 18. He was the first secretary of state to visit Beijing in five years. His hosts previewed the tense visit with multiple and not very diplomatic warnings. They accused Washington of engaging in “irresponsible bullying” and living “under the “illusion” that they could deal with China from a “position of strength”. Qin Gang, China’s new foreign minister who had taken office in February 2023, warned Blinken that he must show “respect” during a pre-trip tense phone call and made clear his government’s view that Washington alone was responsible for the abysmal state of relations between the two countries.

According to a review written for The Washington Post and published on the day the Secretary of State arrived in Beijing, John Hudson expressed the hope that the “two nations could move beyond feuding rhetoric and make progress on establishing regular lines of communication – a modest objective given the many existing disagreements over trade, human rights, Taiwan, Hong Kong and cybersecurity.” The White House in Washington indicated that Blinken’s visit could begin a series of high-level meetings between China and the United States including one between Presidents Biden and Xi. Blinken arrived with a full agenda that included meetings with Qin; Wang Yi, the Communist Party’s top foreign affairs official American business leaders, American embassy personnel; exchange students; and possibly Xi himself. Continued Hudson, “Many times wealthier and more globally connected than it was in the 1970s, China has been flexing its diplomatic muscles recently, brokering a rapprochement between regional rivals Saudi Arabia and Iran, hosting French President Emmanuel Macron and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and flirting with the role of peacemaker on the Middle East and the war in Ukraine.”

The US officials responsible for China affairs had low expectations for the Blinken trip, downplaying that it will start a major rapprochement. Chinese officials set an even lower bar of expectation, accusing Washington of sending mixed messages about where it wants to take the relationship. “The U.S. side asks for communication on the one side, yet on the other, suppresses and contains China by every possible means,” said a spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Minister on the eve of the Blinken visit. While the Republican Party leadership in Congress was critical of the Blinken initiative, he received encouragement from US business leaders for following a more accommodating approach given that the trade between the two countries is estimated now to be $700 billion a year.

At the time of the Blinken visit, China faced an economic slowdown, increasing youth unemployment, and drop in the level of investment. Given these economic difficulties, it was keen to have US Treasury Secretary Janet L Yellen and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo to travel to Beijing and address such issues as technology restrictions on China. The Chinese had already hosted Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates; Jamie Morgan, head of Chase Bank; Starbucks CEO, Narasimhan; and Tesla and Twitter CEO Elon Musk.

Progress in defense was seen as more difficult by both sides. Beijing recently rejected an American offer for Lloyd Austin, its Defense Secretary, to meet his Chinese counterpart, Li Shangfu. Beijing views American deployment of air and naval assets to the South China Sea as an affront to its sovereignty. “The United States has gotten very used to using international waters and airways to do intelligence and reconnaissance for decades,” said Michael O’Hanlon, a military scholar at the Brookings Institution. “We do this constantly 20 miles off the Chinese coast – and they are typically not 20 miles off our coast. We Americans like it that way – we don’t really believe in playing fair or having a level playing ground when it comes to who gets to snoop on whom. All this stuff is going to stay tense.”

Chinese officials may refrain from any public scolding of Blinken while appearing next to him, but state media outlets are unlikely to hold back. “I expect that the Chinese media will continue to be uncharitable to Secretary Blinken during and after the visit,” said Ryan Hass, a China expert and former Obama official. “It’s going to be test of discipline for Secretary Blinken and his team to tune out the noise and focus on the message that the Chinese are conveying behind closed doors.”

Following several hours of meetings with Qin, Blinken met Xi on June 20, the second day of his China visit. The two had a “candid and productive discussion”, with Blinken underscoring “the importance of responsibly managing the United States and China relations through open channels of communication to ensure competition does not veer into conflict,” State Department’s Matthew Miller said in a statement. For his part, Wang told Blinken that the United States needed to “reflect deeply” and work with China to avoid “strategic surprises” according to China’s Foreign Ministry. “The two sides must make a choice between dialogue and confrontation or conflict,” said Wang. He asked Washington to lift sanctions against China and to stop “hyping up” the “China threat theory”.

Chinese state media, after having accused Blinken as a meddling provocateur, adopted a gentler tone after the visit was done and official statements had been issued. The talks had brought “positive expectations to the international community,” said an editorial in The Global Times, a nationalist tabloid affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party. After the meetings were done, President Biden said he hoped to meet Xi in coming months to discuss the issues that remain contentious. Xi might attend the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meeting in November in San Francisco. The two leaders could meet at that time. It was perhaps a coincidence that India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi made a state visit to Washington right after Blinken completed his Beijing visit.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 26^th, 2023.

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