Antony Blinken lands in bid to break the ice with Beijing

The highest-level trip by a US official to China in five years gets under way as the two sides look to turn down the temperature.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrives in Bejing on Sunday. Picture: AFP

Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Sunday began the highest-level trip by a US official to China in nearly five years as the two powers looked to turn down the temperature in an escalating rivalry.

Officials played down hopes of a breakthrough during Mr Blinken’s two days in Beijing. He was originally scheduled to visit in February but abruptly scrapped his plans as the US protested – and later shot down – a Chinese spy balloon flying over its soil.

US President Joe Biden played down the balloon episode as Mr Blinken was heading to China, saying: “I don’t think the leadership knew where it was and knew what was in it and knew what was going on. I think it was more embarrassing than it was intentional.”

Mr Biden said he hoped to again meet President Xi Jinping after their long and strikingly cordial meeting in November on the sidelines of a G20 summit in Bali, where they agreed on Mr Blinken’s visit. “I’m hoping that, over the next several months, I’ll be meeting with Xi again and talking about legitimate differences we have but also how there’s areas we can get along,” Mr Biden said.

The two leaders are likely to ­attend the next G20 summit, in September in New Delhi, and Mr Xi is invited to San Francisco in November when the US hosts the APEC forum.

Mr Blinken has said he will seek to avoid “miscalculations” and to “responsibly manage” relations with the country identified by US policymakers across party lines as the greatest challenge to Washington’s global primacy.

“Intense competition requires sustained diplomacy to ensure that competition does not veer into confrontation or conflict,” he said on Friday in Washington.

The US and China are at odds over a slew of issues including trade, technology and Taiwan. Beijing has not ruled out seizing Taiwan by force and has conducted military drills twice since ­August near the self-governing democracy, in response to top US politicians’’ actions.

Ahead of Mr Blinken’s visit, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said the US needed to “respect China’s core concerns” and “give up the illusion of dealing with China “from a position of strength”.

Beijing has been especially irritated by Mr Biden’s restrictions on the export of high-end semiconductors to China, with the US both fearing their military application and eager to prevent the communist state from dominating next-generation technologies.

In a rising domestic priority for the US, Mr Blinken is expected to press China to curb precursor chemicals sent to Latin America to produce fentanyl, the powerful painkiller behind an addiction pandemic that kills tens of thousands of Americans a year.

“We’re going to discuss this issue directly, and we’re going to be looking for steps to reduce the scale of the problem,” a US official travelling with Mr Blinken said.

Washington has also lashed China over human rights, with Mr Blinken’s visit the first by a cabinet member since the US accused ­Beijing of genocide against the Muslim Uighur minority.

As part of the Biden administration’s focus on keeping allies close, Mr Blinken spoke by phone with his counterparts from Japan and South Korea during his 20-hour trans-­Pacific journey. US National Security adviser Jake Sullivan travelled to Tokyo for separate meetings involving Japan and South Korea and The Philippines. In recent months the US has reached deals on troop deployments in southern Japan and the northern Philippines, both strategically close to Taiwan.

Mr Blinken before departure also met in Washington with his counterpart from ally Singapore, who voiced hope that the US would stay as a power but also find ways to coexist with a rising China.

Mr Blinken’s “trip is essential, but not sufficient”, Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan said. “There are fundamental differences in outlook, in values. And it takes time for mutual respect and strategic trust to be built in.”

Mr Blinken is the first top US diplomat to visit Beijing since a stop in 2018 by his predecessor Mike Pompeo, who later championed no-holds-barred confrontation with China in the final years of Donald Trump’s presidency.

Danny Russel, the top diplomat on East Asia during Barack Obama’s second term, doubted Mr Blinken’s brief trip would ­resolve fundamental differences. “But his visit may well restart badly needed face-to-face dialogue and send a signal that both countries are moving from angry rhetoric at the press podium to sober discussions behind closed doors.”

AFP