As he wrapped up his two-day visit to Beijing on Monday, US secretary of state Antony Blinken was candid about the limits of its success. The two sides remain at odds over everything from Taiwan to human rights, China’s use of economic coercion and the US’s application of unilateral sanctions.
Blinken failed to persuade China to establish a military-to-military crisis communications system to avoid accidental clashes in the Taiwan Straits and the South China Sea. And his Chinese interlocutors made no apparent progress in convincing Washington to stop targeting China with export bans and other economic sanctions.
But Blinken’s visit, delayed for four months after a furore over a Chinese spy balloon last February, was never designed to achieve a breakthrough of issues of policy. Its purpose was instead to stabilise the relationship between Washington and Beijing and to move it on to a more positive trajectory.
The two sides agreed to further high-level contacts, with other senior US officials to visit Beijing and more Chinese figures to go to Washington. These visits will help to set the stage for Chinese president Xi Jinping to visit the US in November, when he is expected to attend an Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) summit.
[ Blinken and Xi agree on need to ‘stabilise’ US-China relationshipOpens in new window ]
Equally important are the intensification of people-to-people contacts, including academic exchanges and an increase in the number of direct flights between the US and China. The isolation brought on by the coronavirus pandemic has served to deepen misunderstanding between the two countries, which has been exacerbated by the mutual expulsion of many of each other’s journalists.
Blinken said he had sought to reassure his Chinese hosts that the US, like the EU, has rejected the idea of economic decoupling in favour of de-risking. And he insisted that Washington had no interest in containing China economically despite measures to limit the export of advanced technologies.
The problem is that neither side trusts the other, and Beijing believes it has been given more reason in recent months to question the sincerity of the Biden administration.
At his press conference in Beijing on Monday, Blinken said he had received assurances that China “is not and will not provide lethal assistance to Russia for use in Ukraine” and that he had seen no evidence to contradict that.
In February Blinken told his European counterparts that he had intelligence suggesting that China was considering just such a move. Beijing suspected at the time that the briefings were designed to undermine its efforts to improve relations with European capitals.
Blinken’s soothing words in Beijing appear to have helped to restore stability to the US-China relationship but a real improvement will require actions that build confidence between the world’s two superpowers.