U.S. Secretary of State Tony Blinken is slated to arrive in China on Sunday for a long-awaited trip that has been postponed for months over spiking tensions between Washington and Beijing. But current signs from both capitals suggest that the Biden administration might not be able to walk away with a “win” anytime soon.
Blinken’s original trip was called off in February, days after the Chinese government flew a spy balloon over the United States, an incident which sent U.S.-China relations into a tailspin.
Officials from the Biden administration and from Chinese President Xi Jinping’s administration have been hosting a flurry of meetings since then trying to patch things up. And although the trip is back on, Biden administration officials have already been working to temper expectations about what the United States might be able to get out of it, as a whole slew of other issues have threatened to send the relationship into further freefall in recent days.
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They say time heals all wounds. But for the U.S.-China relationship, time only seems to expand and exacerbate lists of grievances. Just in the last several days, new concerns about China using an outpost in Cuba to spy on the United States have spilled out into the open, following reports from The Wall Street Journal and Politico. Blinken himself confirmed some of the concerns, noting China upgraded its intelligence collection facilities in Cuba in 2019.
China’s military moves have unsettled the relationship, too. A Chinese warship recently cut off a U.S. Navy ship in an incident the Pentagon has called “an unsafe maritime interaction,” forcing the American destroyer to make some maneuvers in order to avert a collision. Last month, a Chinese fighter pilot shot in front of a U.S. reconnaissance plane in an “aggressive maneuver,” forcing it to fly through the Chinese aircraft’s wake turbulence.
These unsafe interactions raise the risk that one or both sides will make dangerous miscalculations, Biden administration officials say. One of the Pentagon’s primary concerns right now is about working to “strengthen the guardrails against conflict” with China in the coming days, U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said this week.
But complicating matters is the fact that Chinese military officials have gummed up some communications channels with the Biden administration, U.S. officials say, ballooning the risk that misinterpretation could drag the United States and China into a more serious conflict.
The close calls are not an isolated incident: Unsafe Chinese confrontations like it have been stacking up in recent months, according to a recent tally from Indo-Pacific Command officials. China’s military has increased its destabilizing military activity near Taiwan on a near daily basis, the U.S. Secretary of Defense warned in remarks at the Shangri-La Dialogue this week.
One of Blinken’s top goals for his meetings in Beijing is to reestablish communication channels with the Chinese to prevent miscalculation from growing into conflict, senior Biden administration officials said.
Blinken is expected to meet with senior Chinese officials to secure this goal, Daniel Kritenbrink, the assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, said on a call earlier this week.
Touch and Go
Not only will it be Blinken’s first visit to Beijing since the spy balloon incident, it will also mark the first trip to Beijing for a U.S. Secretary of State since 2018, making it a key test of the Biden administration’s approach to China at a time when Xi is increasingly leaning into military aggression and coercion.
If history can serve as any guide, the Biden administration’s first senior-level meeting with Chinese officials in Alaska in 2021 devolved into chaos and finger-pointing over human rights.
The White House is not confident it will be able to pull it off.
“This is not a visit in which I would anticipate a long list of deliverables coming out of it,” Kurt Campbell, the deputy assistant to the President and Coordinator for Indo-Pacific Affairs, told reporters on a call this week.
The sober assessment on possible outcomes for the trip has raised questions about why the Biden administration is going through the trouble of sending Blinken at all.
Despite the growing tensions, the Biden administration recognizes that it’s necessary to run the traps on diplomacy even when disagreements crop up, Jacob Stokes, a former national security aide to Biden and former acting special adviser to the vice president for Asia policy, told The Daily Beast.
“We’re trying to move towards a framework for the relationship where we continue to have diplomacy even as we have these areas of disagreement,” Stokes said. “There’s always going to be something that’s happening that we disagree about.”
Chinese official rhetoric about the relationship has been stern and ominous at best in recent days.
In a possible preview of what some meetings may look like in China, China’s Foreign Minister Qin Gang warned Blinken this week that the United States ought to “stop interfering in China’s internal affairs,” according to China’s Foreign Ministry.
Chinese President Xi Jinping has been warning his country to prepare for escalating tensions.
“We must be prepared for worst-case and extreme scenarios, and be ready to withstand the major test of high winds, choppy waters and even dangerous storms,” Xi said at a recent national security meeting.
U.S. officials acknowledged they heard that Beijing was interested in putting the relationship on ice, but said there is still room for optimism.
“We’ve heard from unofficial interlocutors just a few months ago that China was giving up on diplomacy with the United States,” Campbell said on the call. “We’ve seen other signals of late that suggest that they recognize that diplomacy with Washington is still important.”
Although Blinken’s trip has been hanging in the balance for months, diplomacy hasn’t dried up entirely. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan met with the Director of the Office of the Central Commission for Foreign Affairs, Wang Yi, in May. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai met with China’s Minister of Commerce. Kritenbrink met last week with Vice Foreign Minister Ma Zhaoxu in Beijing.
Privately, Chinese officials have said they want “to stop the downward spiral in the relationship,” according to the assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs.
Regardless, Blinken has a trip agenda ahead of him with no good answers, said Derek Grossman, a former daily intelligence briefer to the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and to the assistant secretary of defense for Asian and Pacific Security Affairs.
“China’s not really in the mood or prepared at all to offer any types of concessions,” Grossman told The Daily Beast. “What to do about the status of Taiwan? What to do about China’s expansive claims over the South China Sea, threatening its neighbors throughout the Indo-Pacific, human rights violations? There’s no real kind of negotiating out of those things.”
Keep Your Enemies Close
Some wins could come from conversations about climate change cooperation and work on counternarcotics to tamp down on the fentanyl crisis in the United States, which U.S. officials say Blinken will bring up.
But working out next steps on those issues is “nothing to hang your hat on,” Grossman cautioned.
“You’re really kind of grasping at straws if these are the things that are going to maintain some sort of productive partnership,” Grossman said.
One of the possible outcomes of the trip may be more meetings between Chinese and American officials, Campbell hinted.
“We expect a series of visits in both directions in the period ahead,” Campbell said.
But at this point it’s not even clear if even key communications channels will be opened as a result of the trip, according to Stokes. Biden administration officials working on this know what it’s like to be undermined by Chinese communications, or lack thereof, in times of crisis—and are likely working to moderate expectations for the outcomes of Blinken’s visit, Stokes said.
“People like Kurt Campbell and Dan Kritenbrink… have been there in earlier instances where one of a few things happened—either China withdrew its participation in certain communications channels because of an incident China didn’t like… or when there was a crisis they would try to call and no one would answer on the other end of the line,” Stokes told The Daily Beast. “They’ve been burned before.”
Even though there are no clear wins ahead at the moment, the meetings are likely to serve as significant intelligence-collecting opportunities to help inform senior leadership on how their counterparts are thinking.
“Even discussions with your worst enemies are discussions that you can learn from and that you can use for future negotiating positions,” Grossman said.
