Chinese paramount chief Xi Jinping declared meaningful results from Blinken’s trip final month. “The two sides have made progress and reached common understandings on some specific issues, which is very good,” Xi mentioned. Yet Xi gave no particulars of that progress, and Chinese diplomats say they need very happy discuss from senior U.S. officers. “Communication must also be effective — it should not be for the sake of communication alone or only seeking to address one’s own concerns while neglecting the concerns of the other side,” mentioned Minister Jing Quan on the Chinese Embassy in Washington.
Blinken and Yellen returned to Washington with pledges for extra high-level diplomatic contact reasonably than tangible progress on hot-button U.S.-China points or detailed plans for subsequent steps in bilateral dialogue. “I don’t have anything specific about future process to announce,” Yellen told reporters on Sunday in Beijing at the conclusion of her visit.
GOP lawmakers say the Biden administration is losing its time. The stream of senior administration officers to Beijing constitutes “zombie engagement with the Chinese Communist Party — all the while the CCP’s malign behavior has gotten worse, not better,” mentioned Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), chair of the House Select Committee on China.
Biden’s envoys have been struggling to revive a measure of predictability to a relationship that has plunged to a 50-year low within the wake of the Chinese spy balloon incident in February. That incident battered a relationship already curdled by tensions over commerce, Beijing’s saber-rattling towards Taiwan and human rights abuses in Xinjiang.
The Biden administration argues that face-to-face dialogue serves a task of its personal — lowering mistrust and paving the way in which for conversations on troublesome subjects.
“None of this gets solved, resolved with one visit, one trip, one conversation. It’s a process,” Blinken told reporters last month.
Such discussions — nevertheless imprecise —are essential at a time when senior U.S. army officers have warned that rising bilateral tensions are pushing the 2 nations towards possible military conflict inside the subsequent 4 years. Kerry mentioned Thursday that diplomatic engagement with Beijing is important to keep away from “the potential for mistakes, the potential for something to inadvertently drag us into an open hot conflict.”
But Blinken’s conferences with Xi and different high Chinese officers have been arduous to promote again in Washington as successful.
The administration has been asking China to take motion to curb the role of Chinese chemical exporters within the opioid overdose epidemic. But Blinken’s Chinese hosts solely agreed “to explore setting up a working group or joint effort” to chop the circulation of Chinese precursor chemical substances that Mexican cartels course of into fentanyl, Blinken told reporters during his trip.
Though Blinken told his Chinese hosts {that a} high U.S. precedence is resolving the instances of American residents who’re wrongfully detained or subject to exit bans in China, no releases have occurred.
And whereas Blinken “repeatedly” raised the U.S. desire to resume high-level military-to-military communications, China continues to balk at doing so. That freeze — which extends to Beijing’s rejections of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s requests to satisfy together with his Chinese counterpart, Li Shangfu — raises the danger of a potential military crisis within the Indo-Pacific.
Blinken’s outreach to Beijing was “weak and desperate” and constituted “pandering to the Chinese Communist Party,” Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) mentioned in an announcement final month.
Yellen’s 4 days in Beijing final week produced upbeat rhetoric however no breakthroughs on the problems roiling the U.S.-China enterprise relationship. The Treasury secretary told reporters ahead of the trip that she deliberate to debate “China’s unfair economic practices … barriers to market access for foreign firms and issues involving intellectual property.”
But Beijing confirmed no motion on these fronts, partly as a result of Yellen didn’t deliver any concession on pending U.S. initiatives like restrictions on outbound investment and curbs on Chinese corporate access to U.S. cloud-computing companies.
The response in an editorial in the Chinese state news agency Xinhua: “It is unproductive when the United States is posturing for dialogue and communication, while tightening its block and containment against China.”
That meant that Yellen spent most of her time in Beijing “trying to reassure the Chinese of U.S. intent” reasonably than brainstorming approaches to particular bilateral disputes, mentioned Mary Lovely, senior fellow on the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Although Yellen reiterated that the U.S. isn’t trying to decouple from the Chinese financial system, the response of her Chinese hosts was possible “Well, show me the money,” Lovely mentioned.
Kerry is hoping he’ll have higher luck in his conferences together with his counterpart, Xie Zhenhua, and different senior Chinese officers next week. But Kerry is prone to make little headway in persuading Beijing to scale back its reliance on coal-fired power manufacturing whereas it struggles to revive its faltering financial system.
“I wouldn’t look for breakthroughs … relations between the two governments remain very challenging,” mentioned David Sandalow, a former senior official on the Department of Energy throughout the Obama administration and founder of the U.S.-China program at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.
Kerry’s potential benefit: U.S.-China climate cooperation is crucial to the success of the year-end U.N. climate conference in Dubai. But Beijing suspended a U.S.-China joint working group on climate cooperation as half of a package of reprisals for then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Taiwan go to in August. “It would be substantive progress if Kerry and Xie could come out of their meetings saying ‘we’ve agreed that the working group is going to meet x-number of times between now and Dubai,’” mentioned Joanna Lewis, an affiliate professor at Georgetown University and an skilled on China’s climate insurance policies.
Kerry’s journey plans have reinvigorated GOP skepticism on Capitol Hill.
“Despite the sweet nothings CCP diplomats murmured into climate envoy Kerry’s ear at Davos or COP26, in 2022 China started construction on six times more coal plant capacity than the rest of the world combined,” mentioned the China committee chair Gallagher. China’s environmental report makes it “the number one enemy” on climate points, reasonably than a companion, Gallagher mentioned.
Others argued that the deal with climate is all unsuitable. “Countering China and their malign agenda should be the top priority of the State Department” reasonably than climate cooperation, mentioned Michael McCaul (R-Texas), chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
The Biden administration argues that China’s standing because the world’s largest source of carbon emissions makes U.S. efforts to spur climate cooperation with Beijing unavoidable. Refusing to take action “would be malpractice of the worst order — diplomatic and political,” Kerry mentioned.
Democratic lawmakers are holding out for the Biden strategy — arguing that talks about talks are how progress begins.
“I reject the notion that diplomacy is an act of weakness,” mentioned Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.), a member of the House Select Committee on China. “Communicating is what countries do, especially when the two countries are the most powerful in the world.”
And reestablishing common and dependable high-level contacts between senior officers can also assist pave the way in which to a much-anticipated head to head encounter between Biden and Xi later this yr.
Outreach by Blinken, Yellen and Kerry supplies “an essential groundwork for a successful Xi-Biden meeting at APEC in the fall and help prevent the relationship from further deterioration,” mentioned Susan Shirk, former deputy assistant secretary of State within the Clinton administration.
