US confirms top diplomat Blinken’s long-anticipated China visit
The United States has confirmed top diplomat Antony Blinken will visit China this week, a long-anticipated trip that was postponed in February due to rising tensions between the two superpowers.
Blinken will be the top Biden government to visit China on a trip from June 16 to 21 and will also include a visit to London, the State Department said on Wednesday.
In Beijing, Binken will meet with senior Chinese officials to discuss the “importance of maintaining open lines of communication” between the US and China, the statement said. Which officials are not concerned.
The top US diplomat “will also raise bilateral concerns, global and regional issues and possible cooperation on shared transnational challenges,” the brief statement said.
US officials were quick to adjust expectations.
“We are not going to Beijing with the intention of making some kind of breakthrough or transformation in the way we interact with each other,” Daniel Kritenbrink, the foreign ministry’s top diplomat for East Asia, said at a briefing call on Wednesday. .
“We come to Beijing with a realistic, confident approach and a genuine desire to manage our competition in the most responsible manner,” said Kritenbrink.
During the same call, White House Indo-Pacific Coordinator Kurt Campbell said Blinken will focus on forwarding “key goals” from his agenda, but has not attempted to produce “a long list of deliverables” .
Those goals will be surpassed by better communication between military personnel, which has proven to be a particular concern in recent times.
“I believe Minister Blinken will strongly argue that these lines of communication are necessary,” Campbell told reporters. “They’re how mature, strong armies interact with each other and the stakes are just too high to avoid these critical lines of communication.”
On Tuesday, Blinken spoke by phone to China’s Foreign Minister Qin Gang, emphasizing “the importance of maintaining open lines of communication to manage the relationship responsibly,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Matthew Miller said in a statement. a statement.
Blinken also “made it clear that the US would continue to use diplomatic arrangements to raise concerns and potential cooperation,” the statement said.
China took a more confrontational tone when reading out the conversation with Blinken, saying Qin had warned that relations between the two countries had faced “new difficulties and challenges” since the beginning of the year.
“It is clear who is responsible,” Qin said, according to China’s foreign ministry.
“China has always viewed and managed China-US relations in accordance with the principles of mutual respect, peaceful coexistence and win-win cooperation as proposed by President Xi Jinping,” he added.
Tensions between the two countries — covering trade, espionage, military presence in the Indo-Pacific, the war in Ukraine and the future of self-governing Taiwan — were on full display in February, when Blinken postponed a planned trip to China.
The delay came amid a dispute over what the US said was a Chinese spy balloon hovering over the US mainland. More recently, US officials, including Blinken, grudgingly admitted that China had operated espionage facilities in Cuba for years, which were improved in 2019. American media had previously reported on the espionage base.
The rhetoric about Taiwan remained high, with Biden saying several times last year that the US would defend the island, which Beijing claims as its own territory, in the event of an incursion from mainland China. The US has long maintained an official policy of “strategic ambiguity,” providing significant military support to Taiwan but not explicitly acknowledging or promising to assist the island in the event of a Chinese attack.
Earlier this month, the US Navy accused its Chinese counterpart of conducting “unsafe” maneuvers near a US destroyer in the Taiwan Strait. Officials described the incident as one of several close calls in recent times at risk of accident and escalation, including an incident in May when a Chinese fighter jet passed right in front of a US surveillance aircraft over the South China Sea. The US called the maneuver “unnecessarily aggressive”, while China attributed it to a “provocation” by the US. Officials have said these incidents underline the need for better communication.
The US has also sought to strengthen its ties with allies in the Indo-Pacific region, including through the informal Quad grouping of the US, Australia, India and Japan. It has also signed a new security pact with the US and UK, called AUKUS, which aims to equip Australia with nuclear-powered submarines.
Trade relations have also been combative in recent years, with Biden enforcing a host of aggressive tariffs imposed by former President Donald Trump. The Biden administration has also imposed export controls on some key advanced technologies, such as semiconductors and the tools used to make them, while encouraging allies to do the same and move critical supply chains away from China.
Beijing, for its part, has regularly accused Washington of having a dangerous “Cold War” mentality.
Nevertheless, the two countries have made some rapprochements in recent months to keep tensions under control. They have also sought cooperation in some areas, especially climate change.
Last month, Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan held extensive closed-door meetings with senior Chinese diplomat Wang Yi in Vienna.
The US called the talks “candid, substantive and constructive”.
The Chinese embassy in Washington, D.C. said talks aimed “to remove obstacles in China-US relations and stabilize the relationship against deterioration.”
Blinken had met Yi earlier in February on the sidelines of the Munich security conference.