When Blinken heads to China for a two-day trip on Sunday and Monday, part of his itinerary will include meeting with the Chinese leader that US President Joe Biden has derided as an “autocrat.”
The meeting would be just the latest between high-ranking US and Chinese officials, including US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen meeting Chinese Vice Premier Liu He, the country’s top economic official, last month in Davos. Xi and Biden previously met at the Group of 20 summit in Bali in November; however, the last US Secretary of State to meet with Xi was Rex Tillerson, then-US President Donald Trump’s first of many foreign ministers, in September 2017.
Analysts quoted in Western media said the Blinken-Xi meeting was a sign that Beijing wants to continue improving relations with Washington since their nadir last August, when then-US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) paid a visit to Taiwan, flouting Chinese warnings not to visit the rebellious island. China responded with massive military drills in the areas surrounding Taiwan, which it considers a province in rebellion that’s destined to be reunited with the mainland.
When Biden and Xi met in Bali several months later, the tensions were still evident, but the two leaders pledged to cooperate where possible, although both were committed to continued competition. Since 2018, the US has considered “great power competition” with Russia and China its chief strategic focus, accusing the two nations of seeking to upend the “rules-based international order” in which the US leads and other nations follow. In Bali, Xi told Biden that he had no such intent.
Blinken is also expected to meet with Wang Yi, his former counterpart who was promoted last month to director of the Office of the Communist Party of China’s Central Foreign Affairs Commission, and with Qin Gang, the former Chinese ambassador to Washington who is China’s new foreign minister.
A US think tank recently warned that Washington’s snubbing of Qin while he was in Washington is likely to have backfired, now that he is China’s new foreign minister.
Almost two years prior, Blinken met Wang at a stormy summit in Alaska, using the event to denounce numerous aspects of Chinese policy, including alleged human rights violations and expansionist aims. Wang accused Blinken of violating his own protocols for the meeting in order to grandstand.