by Daniel DePetris
For the first time in five years, a U.S. secretary of state set foot on Chinese soil for an official visit. Antony Blinken, America’s top diplomat, spent the weekend in multiple meetings with senior Chinese officials in the hope that a little jaw-jaw will begin the process of defusing the mountain of grievances the U.S. and China have with one another.
Despite grumblings from China hawks on Capitol Hill that Blinken’s visit to China was a wimpy display of appeasement to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the reality is that the trip was long overdue. Blinken was originally scheduled to visit China in February, almost three months after Presidents Joe Biden and Xi Jinping met on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Bali and pledged to improve a bilateral relationship that, at that point, was circling the drain.
But then came the discovery of the Chinese spy balloon hovering over the United States, which created a news media frenzy and heaped political pressure on Biden to retaliate. He did so not only by shooting the balloon down over the South Carolina coast but also by canceling Blinken’s trip days before he was supposed to leave.
Bilateral ties between the world’s two largest economic and military powers haven’t been the same since. If anything, they’ve become more acrimonious. China continues to view the U.S. as an established superpower that is actively trying to undermine Chinese economic progress through its technology export controls and blacklisting of Chinese firms. The U.S. sees China as an increasingly aggressive nation seeking dominance in Asia and hoping to expand its influence in the Western Hemisphere.
The Taiwan issue remains the biggest sore spot for Washington and Beijing, with each side assuming the absolute worst of the other. China has made it abundantly clear that it won’t tolerate what it refers to as Taiwanese separatism or independence, which if realized would likely spur Chinese military action to forcefully reincorporate the island with the mainland. In U.S. policymaking circles, the general assumption is no longer whether, but rather when, China will invade Taiwan.
It’s when tensions are high when diplomacy can be most effective. So Blinken’s foray into China was a commonsense move, and anybody who opposed it has a responsibility to explain why their alternative course of action — namely, banking on a Cold War-style containment policy — would meet U.S. policy goals at an acceptable cost. The fact that the case has never been clearly articulated, outside of talking points that lazily equate diplomacy with weakness, is a big indictment on the argument itself.
Keeping the diplomatic option, of course, doesn’t mean diplomacy is bound to succeed quickly. With respect to China, it most certainly won’t. Indeed, Blinken came away from his trip without major deliverables. His 7 ½-hour meeting with Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang; session with Wang Yi, the CCP’s top foreign policy official; and his short interaction with Xi didn’t produce the traditional agreements one might have dreamed about.
Blinken himself acknowledged that reestablishing military-to-military communications between Washington and Beijing, a top U.S. objective, is still a work in progress. “China has not agreed to move forward with that,” he told reporters at the tail end of his trip. “It’s an issue we have to keep working on.”
But none of this should have been a surprise. The U.S. and China have deeply rooted systemic disputes on everything from Taiwan and the South China Sea to semiconductors and global supply chains. To think any of this could have been resolved in two days of meetings, however long and constructive, would be setting the bar far too high. We are unfortunately at a point in the U.S.-China relationship where easy solutions are no longer possible.
From the U.S. standpoint, the objective of the trip was more realistic: Stop the downward spiral and grease the wheels for more meetings between senior U.S. and Chinese officials. On that front at least, it appears that Blinken’s trip was fruitful. The State Department announced that Qin will travel to Washington at some point in the future. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo will likely schedule trips of their own to China.
The probability of Biden and Xi coming together in person for a second time in two years, during the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation conference in San Francisco this November, just went up as well. If such a meeting did occur, it would be pivotal, because managing U.S.-China relations responsibly will ultimately need to be driven from the very top. This is especially the case with respect to China, where Xi has consolidated his power over the CCP to an extent we haven’t seen since Mao Zedong more than 70 years earlier.
Washington and Beijing also agreed to establish working groups on issues like stemming the flow of fentanyl precursors, resuming direct flights between the U.S. and China and finding a mutually acceptable arrangement that would increase the flow of journalists, students and ordinary citizens to one another’s countries. While this sounds like small potatoes in the realm of great power politics, the world’s two biggest states have to start somewhere — and it doesn’t take a geopolitical genius to recognize that talking about territorial claims in the South China Sea would shut down the conversation before it even began.
This isn’t the first time U.S. and Chinese officials have talked about stabilizing relations. Biden and Xi committed themselves to a similar task nearly a year ago, but events (such as Balloon Gate) overtook it. The U.S. and China appear to have recommitted to the same goal. Words, however, will need to be followed by actions. Otherwise, it’s all talk.
