President Joe Biden (right) and Chinese President Xi Jinping shake hands before a meeting on the sidelines of the G20 summit meeting last year. The Biden administration argues that face-to-face dialogue can decrease distrust and pave the way for conversations on difficult topics.
Michael Euler/AP Photo
Biden’s envoys have been struggling to restore a measure of predictability to a relationship that has plunged to a 50-year low in the wake of the Chinese spy balloon incident in February. That incident battered a relationship already curdled by tensions over trade, Beijing’s saber-rattling toward Taiwan and human rights abuses in Xinjiang.
The Biden administration argues that face-to-face dialogue serves a role of its own — decreasing distrust and paving the way for conversations on difficult topics.
“None of this gets solved, resolved with one visit, one trip, one conversation. It’s a process,” Blinken told reporters last month.
Such discussions — however vague —are important at a time when senior U.S. military officials have warned that rising bilateral tensions are pushing the two countries toward possible military conflict within the next four years. Kerry said Thursday that diplomatic engagement with Beijing is necessary to avoid “the potential for mistakes, the potential for something to inadvertently drag us into an open hot conflict.”
But Blinken’s meetings with Xi and other top Chinese officials were hard to sell back in Washington as a success.
The administration has been asking China to take action to curb the role of Chinese chemical exporters in the opioid overdose epidemic. But Blinken’s Chinese hosts only agreed “to explore setting up a working group or joint effort” to cut the flow of Chinese precursor chemicals that Mexican cartels process into fentanyl, Blinken told reporters during his trip.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken (left) with Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang (right) in Beijing. While Blinken “repeatedly” raised the U.S. desire to resume high-level military-to-military communications, China continues to balk at doing so.
