Secretary of State Antony Blinken will arrive in Beijing on Sunday for a whirlwind diplomatic trip as the Biden administration seeks to stabilize strained ties between the world’s two biggest economies.
The top US diplomat, whose previous attempt to visit China in February was scrapped at the last minute when the US revealed that an alleged Chinese spy balloon was floating over American territory, will have a series of meetings with senior officials over the two days that he’s on the ground.
He will meet Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang on Sunday with his traveling delegation, followed by a smaller meeting and then a dinner, according to a senior State Department official who briefed reporters in Tokyo en route to China. Blinken may also have a meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping and deliver remarks at a news conference before he departs.
Blinken, the most senior US official to visit China in five years, is making his trip at a tumultuous time in US-China relations, with the two sides sparring over everything from human rights and technology to trade and weapons sales to Taiwan.
Despite the high-profile nature of the trip, senior US officials have played down expectations of Blinken accomplishing any sort of dramatic reset with China or resolving any of the fundamental disagreements between Washington and Beijing.
The primary goal of Blinken’s trip will be to try and reestablish senior-level communications channels with Chinese counterparts, including between the US and Chinese militaries, in order to manage the intense competition between the two countries, the senior official said.
Before he departed from Washington, Blinken said on Friday his main goals are to build empowered communications channels between the US and China, raise candid US concerns about Chinese policies, and push for cooperation on global issues including climate change and macroeconomic stability.
“We’re not going to Beijing with the intent of having some sort of breakthrough or transformation in the way that we deal with one another,” Daniel Kritenbrink, the assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, told reporters before the trip. “We’re coming to Beijing with a realistic, confident approach and a sincere desire to manage our competition in the most responsible way possible.”
Blinken’s visit is part of a renewed flurry of high-level US-China engagement that has gradually picked up momentum after the balloon incident derailed an attempt by Biden and Xi — who met late last year in Bali, Indonesia — to establish a steadier path for bilateral relations. Biden said Saturday he’s “hoping that over the next several months I’ll be meeting Xi again.”
Some of meetings have taken place in public, including when Chinese Commerce Minister Wang Wentao visited the US. But other meetings have been out of the limelight. White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan recently met with his Chinese counterpart for a low-key meeting in Vienna, while CIA Director Bill Burns made a secret trip to Beijing last month to discuss intelligence issues.
At the same time, US and China ties have not exactly been on a steady path toward more normalized relations. Both sides are well aware of the state of bilateral relations, and there’s a recognition on both sides that senior-level interactions are needed to help stabilize the relationship, the senior State Department official said in Tokyo.
The US and Chinese militaries recently had two dangerous confrontations between naval vessels and jets in the South China Sea, which the Pentagon characterized as “unnecessarily aggressive” and “dangerous.” Chinese Defense Minister Li Shangfu — who is sanctioned by the US government in relation to Russian arms purchases — also recently rejected a meeting with his US counterpart Lloyd Austin when the two men attended a defense forum in Singapore this month.
The turbulent nature of US-China relations, as well as the prospect that another incident related to Taiwan could again send ties into a tailspin, have tempered expectations for Blinken’s visit and what the top US diplomat can hope to accomplish.
“A good outcome would be a better understanding of each side’s concerns and red lines as well as modest progress on areas of overlapping interest,” said Jessica Chen Weiss, a professor of China and Asia-Pacific studies at Cornell University. “Ultimately, one hopes that the two sides can make progress in the next several months toward a principled framework to manage US-China relations, one backed by small but credible signs of a shared interest in stabilizing the relationship.”