Antony Blinken’s meeting with Xi Jinping on Monday may have lasted only 35 minutes, but both sides insisted that it represented progress in the strained relationship. The two men exchanged warm words while both refusing to budge on their respective core interests.
That the US secretary of state was able to meet China’s leader at all was a diplomatic coup for the highly anticipated visit. Blinken is the highest-ranking US official to visit Beijing since 2018, but until he arrived in the Chinese capital it was not confirmed that he would meet China’s leader.
The meeting was brief compared with Blinken’s seven-and-a-half-hour marathon encounter with his Chinese counterpart, Qin Gang. But it was the culmination of an effort to stabilise the fraught relationship between the world’s two biggest economies.
Wen-ti Sung, a political scientist at the Australian National University, said: “China’s top leader personally meeting a US envoy lower than him in rank signals to Chinese government that China is in a gracious mood, and it gives Chinese bureaucrats political cover to extend an olive branch and make occasional compromises necessary to repair relations.”
According to a Chinese readout of the Xi-Blinken meeting, Xi said that “China respects the interests of the US” and would not “challenge or replace” the western superpower. Xi also called on the US to “respect China and not harm China’s legitimate rights and interests”.
The US had made it clear before Blinken’s visit that it did not expect any breakthroughs from the trip. Rather, it was intended to prevent the relationship from deteriorating further. But just one day after Blinken’s meeting, the Wall Street Journal reported that China was also in negotiations to establish a new joint military training facility in Cuba, highlighting the continuing mistrust between China and the US. Some analysts argue that Beijing’s interactions with Cuba are a reaction against the US’s cooperation with Taiwan.
Blinken insisted that the US supported the maintenance of the status quo on the Taiwan issue, and did not support moves towards Taiwanese independence.
But attempts to reinstate more tangible avenues of cooperation were rebuffed. Beijing declined Washington’s request to resume military-to-military communication channels, which have been frozen since the spy balloon incident in February. The Chinese side has also cited US sanctions against Chinese individuals, institutions and companies as a barrier to communications.
Beijing is particularly exercised about US sanctions against Li Shangfu, the defence minister. At the Shangri-La dialogue, an Asian defence summit in Singapore held in early June, Li refused to meet his US counterpart, Lloyd Austin. Li has been under US sanctions since 2018. Many Chinese analysts see the failure to lift sanctions as evidence that the US is not sincere in its claims to want to restore the relationship.
Prof Philip Hsu, the director of the Center for China Studies at National Taiwan University, said: “The Biden administration is apparently unyielding on the bilateral security relations, and I do not think that either Xi or the Chinese society had hoped to attain anything concrete in this respect.”
Aside from mutual declarations of progress, neither side seemed to budge on topics such as trade, human rights and the war in Ukraine. But trips from other US officials such as the treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, and the commerce secretary, Gina Raimondo, later in the year may help to improve economic cooperation.
One element of the trip that attracted controversy was the western media’s images of Blinken’s arrival in Beijing. State media and people online criticised the use of footage that appeared to show Beijing’s sky cast in a dark filter. The state media tabloid the Global Times accused the international press of “maliciously fabricating the weather in Beijing as cloudy and hazy”. Responding to the criticisms on Twitter, BBC Chinese noted that several outlets had used the same wire footage, including CGTN, a Chinese state broadcaster.
