US Secretary of State Antony Blinken (L) shakes hands with China’s President Xi Jinping on the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on June 19, 2023.
Leah Millis | Afp | Getty Images
U.S. President Joe Biden said Secretary of State Antony Blinken “did a hell of a job” in Beijing.
His comments got here after Blinken’s high-profile diplomatic mission to China, aimed toward soothing strained ties with Beijing.
“We’re on the fitting trail here,” Biden said Monday.
In a surprise meeting, Blinken met Chinese President Xi Jinping for a 35-minute meeting toward the tip of his two-day visit. He’s the highest-level American official to go to China in nearly five years.
Asked if he felt progress had been made within the Blinken-Xi meeting, the U.S. president responded: “You haven’t got to ask that. You may ask how much progress was made.”
Blinken also met China’s top diplomat Wang Yi in addition to Foreign Minister Qin Gang through the visit.
Listed here are other takeaways from Blinken’s trip to China:
Progress made
Biden wasn’t the just one who saw progress within the talks.
“The 2 sides have agreed to follow through the common understanding President Biden and I had reached in Bali,” Xi said in a video carried by Chinese state-owned media CCTV.
Either side also “made progress and reached agreement on some specific issues,” he said without disclosing further details. “This is superb.”
Xi called for stable relations with the U.S., saying the world needs the connection of the 2 economic giants to be “generally stable.”
The U.S. State Department described the talks as “candid, substantive, and constructive.”
Door to future talks
Blinken’s meeting could pave the best way for Biden to fulfill Xi in November.
“Either side agreed on follow-on senior engagements in Washington and Beijing to proceed open lines of communication,” in keeping with the State Department.
The secretary of State invited Qin to go to the U.S. and so they agreed to schedule a reciprocal visit at a mutually suitable time, in keeping with the statement.
While no date was announced, they agreed to keep up high-level interactions, in keeping with the Chinese government.
The conversations between Qin and Blinken have been “largely positive” based on the readouts from each nations, said Mark Hannah, senior fellow on the Eurasia Group Foundation.
“While much gets unnoticed of those official accounts, the language either side chooses to characterize the meetings is a sign of the tone which was struck,” Hannah told CNBC.Â
Rivalry
Chinese state media quoted Xi as saying: “Competition amongst major powers doesn’t conform to the trend of the times, let alone solve America’s own problems and the challenges facing the world.”
Bonnie Gasler, managing director of the Indo-Pacific program at German Marshall Fund, said this point in Xi’s speech was “problematic.”
“In my opinion, it is going to not be possible to stabilize bilateral ties unless Beijing accepts that competition is now the dominant feature of U.S.-China relations and requires lively and effective management,” Gasler told CNBC.
The Biden administration has been attempting to persuade the Chinese to simply accept competition because the mainstay of the connection, and recognize that it is important to work together to administer the competition and “prevent competition from veering into conflict,” Gasler tweeted.
Tech rivalry between the U.S. and China also intensified in recent months, with the U.S. blocking China’s access to advanced chip tech and China banning key infrastructure operators from buying U.S. tech giant Micron’s products.
Based on a People’s Day by day statement, Wang asked the U.S. to provide up its so-called “China threat theory,” and to lift sanctions against China and to stop suppressing China’s technological development. The State Department didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment on China’s statement.
Robert Daly, director of the Wilson Center’s Kissinger Institute on China and the U.S., acknowledged that the likelihood of war is low, but said the rivalry will go on.
“There is a joint decision, a joint realization that we mustn’t go to war, but each countries are going to maintain competing in every index of power everywhere in the world, by all means wanting war,” Daly told CNBC before Xi’s meeting with Blinken.
Established order on Taiwan
Blinken also said he raised concerns about China’s “provocative actions within the Taiwan Strait, in addition to within the South and East China Seas.”
But he sought to guarantee Beijing: “On Taiwan, I reiterated the longstanding U.S. ‘one China’ policy. That policy has not modified.”
China considers Taiwan a part of its territory that should be reunified with the mainland. Beijing has never renounced the usage of force against Taiwan and has been using increasingly aggressive rhetoric toward the island.
“We don’t support Taiwan independence. We remain against any unilateral changes to the establishment by either side. We proceed to expect the peaceful resolution of cross-strait differences,” said Blinken adding that Washington stays committed to the Taiwan Relations Act, including ensuring that Taiwan has the power to defend itself.
In his meeting with Blinken on Monday, Wang emphasized that “safeguarding national unity will at all times be the core of China’s core interests.” He added that the U.S. must “respect China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, and clearly oppose ‘Taiwan independence.'”
Tensions should remain
Geopolitical tensions could still remain high, nevertheless.
“Neither country’s threat assessments are happening. They have not modified their threat assessments. We have not modified our intentions. We have not modified our tactics,” Daly told CNBC prior to the Xi-Blinken meeting.
“These dialogues are terrific, the more of them we now have, the higher — but there is no such thing as a sign thus far that either side is basically changing any of its assessments of itself of the opposite,” Daly told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia” Monday.
The State Department said Blinken emphasized that the U.S. will at all times arise for Americans’ values, and addressed China’s “unfair and nonmarket economic practices and up to date actions against U.S. firms.”
Xi maintained his stance that the U.S. must respect China and “not harm China’s legitimate rights and interests,” adding that Beijing may even respect the interests of the U.S. “and won’t challenge or replace the U.S.”
“Neither party can shape the opposite in keeping with its own wishes, let alone deprive the opposite of its legitimate right to development,” said Xi.
