Biden’s top diplomats to break ice with China counterparts in Alaska

Beijing’s undeclared embargo on more than $20bn of Australian exports will be on the agenda in Anchorage.

Antony Blinken testifies to congress on Thursday. Picture: AFP

President Joe Biden’s top aides will meet China’s most senior foreign policy officials for the first time just days after the inaugural leaders’ meeting of the Quad, as the new US administration works with allies and partners in its dealings with Beijing.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan will next week meet in Alaska with Yang Jiechi — China’s most senior foreign policy official — and Foreign Minister Wang Yi. It will be the first in-person meeting of senior officials from the world’s two most powerful countries in more than eight months.

“This is an important opportunity for us to lay out in very frank terms the many concerns we have with Beijing’s actions and behaviour that are challenging the security, the prosperity and the values of the United States,” Mr Blinken said after the high-level summit was confirmed.

The meeting, in Anchorage, follows repeated requests by the Chinese side and will be held less than a week after the first leaders’ meeting (early on Saturday morning AEDT) of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or Quad, made up of the US, Japan, India and Australia.

China’s sweeping “undeclared economic embargoes” on Australian exports worth more than $20bn-a-year will be on the meeting’s agenda, along with Beijing’s actions in Hong Kong and pressure on Taiwan, as well as areas of co-operation such as managing the COVID-19 pandemic and ­climate change, a senior administration official told The Wall Street Journal.

The Biden administration has repeatedly stressed that co-ordination with allies and partners will be a key plank of its strategy to counter Beijing’s more assertive economic, foreign and military policies.

Before the meeting, Mr Blinken and Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin will visit Japan and South Korea in their first overseas trips since taking office. Mr Austin will then visit India, as Mr Blinken heads to Alaska.

At the National People’s Congress this week, President Xi Jinping warned China must “be prepared to respond to a variety of complex and difficult situations”.

Chinese Foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian was restrained when asked about Saturday’s meeting of the leaders of the Quad countries: US Mr Biden, ­Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga and Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison.

“We hope that the relevant countries will … do more things that are conducive to regional peace, stability and development, not the other way around,” Mr Zhao said at a regular press conference in Beijing.

Liu Xiaobo, director of the Ocean Research Centre of the Grandview Institution, a Beijing-based think tank, told The Australian that China was concerned about the Quad’s trajectory.

“There is a general consensus that the Quad is part of the measures taken by the United States, Japan, India and Australia to counterbalance China’s rising economic, military and international influence,” said Mr Liu, who served in the People’s Liberation Army Navy for 25 years.

“China is currently concerned about whether the Quad will gradually change from four-party security talks to a security mechanism. If so, that would indicate that the Quad will become a military ­security organisation similar to NATO, and China will become an opponent of this organisation … beginning a new Cold War,” he said, speaking in a personal capacity.

However, he noted the US, Japan, India, and Australia all had their own strategic considerations when dealing with China.

“The Indo-Pacific strategies of these four countries differ in their goals, means and measures. Therefore, in terms of security, the Quad is different from NATO and it is difficult to set up China as a common enemy the way European countries treated the Soviet Union. In this sense, China should not take the initiative to regard the Quad as a completely opposed security alliance mechanism, and should handle its relations with these four countries separately,” he said.