At a March 10 hearing of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the U.S. would address Beijing‘s concerns in a “frank” manner at a meeting between U.S. and Chinese diplomats on March 18.
The U.S. and China have raised different expectations for their first key meeting next Thursday (March 18), underscoring the domestic pressure on both sides to restart relations while avoiding appearing weak.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan will meet next week in Anchorage, Alaska, with Yang Jiechi, head of the Office of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, and CPC Foreign Minister Wang Yi. This will be the highest-level meeting between U.S. and Chinese officials since President Joe Biden took office.
The meeting is seven days away, but the two sides have disagreed on whether the meeting should be positioned as a “strategic dialogue. Blinken says the talks are not a strategic dialogue, but China says they are.
Former President Donald Trump (Trump) has canceled such regular talks after several ineffective “strategic dialogues” with the Chinese side. Most recently, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Yang Jiechi met in Hawaii last June, but the two sides did not reach substantive results.
The Biden Administration did not want to position the meeting under the same name as in the past. During a hearing before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Wednesday (10), Blinken made it clear that the meeting was not a “strategic dialogue” and that the two sides had no plans for follow-up contacts at this stage.
He added that any future talks must be based on the premise that “we have seen tangible progress and concrete results on issues of concern to the U.S. side.
But a few hours later, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said the March 18-19 meeting was a “high-level strategic dialogue” held “at the invitation of the U.S. side.
Bloomberg reported Thursday (11) that the U.S. and China’s respective statements suggest that the meeting, which could set the tone for the world’s most important diplomatic relationship, remains high stakes.
Relations between China and the United States have fallen to their lowest level in decades in 2020, with increased sanctions and mutual tariff hikes, expulsions of journalists and consulate closures; since last December, after Biden’s victory, Chinese Communist authorities have been hoping to send Yang Jiechi to the United States as soon as possible to try to calm the sharply increasing confrontational relations between the United States and China. However, the Chinese Embassy in the U.S. denied this at one point after the U.S. media reported it.
So far, senior Chinese and U.S. officials have indicated on various occasions that the two sides may seek cooperation on global issues such as climate change.
Both sides blowing off softness ahead of next week’s meeting
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang said at his annual news conference in Beijing on Thursday that he would like to see a dialogue with the Biden administration at “different levels. “Even if we can’t solve all the problems in a short Time, such an exchange of views will help promote trust and dispel doubts,” Li said. Li Keqiang said.
Before the face-to-face meeting, the Biden administration also arranged high-profile meetings between two Cabinet officials in Japan and South Korea, as well as the first-ever elevation of the quadripartite talks from Cabinet to a video conference with national leaders, plus the location of the first meeting between China and the United States on U.S. soil, suggesting that the Biden administration wants to show strength to the Chinese side.
Blinken said at the hearing Wednesday that the meeting “is an opportunity for us to put it (the issue) on the table.
Chinese representatives Yang Jiechi and Wang Yi have both recently repeatedly blamed Trump and the United States for the deterioration of U.S.-China relations, urging Washington to reopen a regular platform for dialogue.
A meeting of the Communist Party of China (CPC) National People’s Congress (NPC) on Thursday defied U.S. protests and passed the Draft Decision on Improving the Electoral System of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, further limiting the proportion of Hong Kong’s members who are elected by popular vote. In addition, the NPC approved a series of plans aimed at expanding China’s economy, modernizing its military and reducing its dependence on U.S. technology. The NPC has been described as a “rubber stamp” for the Chinese Communist Party.
Expert: No Positive Results if China Repeats Same Old Talks
Bonnie Glaser, director of the China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Washington think tank, told the Voice of America that if the Chinese side keeps up the same old rhetoric in the talks, there will be no positive outcome. If the Chinese side continues to play the same old game, the talks will not have a positive outcome,” she said.
She said, “If Chinese officials repeat what they’ve said in recent speeches, that the blame for problems in the U.S.-China relationship lies with the United States, that the ball is on the U.S. side, then this meeting will not have a positive outcome.”
According to Grey, the high-level U.S.-China talks will likely focus primarily on areas where the two sides disagree, including China’s (CCP) policy toward Hong Kong, its intimidation of Taiwan, its economic coercion of Australia, and its treatment of the Uighurs in Xinjiang.
Since taking office, the Biden administration has appeared to continue the Trump Administration‘s hard-line stance on China on a number of issues, including maintaining its determination that the Chinese Communist government has committed genocide against the Uighurs in Xinjiang, condemning Beijing’s erosion of democracy in Hong Kong and military intimidation of Taiwan, criticizing the Chinese Communist Party’s lack of transparency in handling the COVID-19 outbreak, and accusing the Chinese Communist Party of unfair practices in trade and commerce.
President Biden and Chinese Communist Party President Xi Jinping touched on these issues during a February phone call, but the two sides do not appear to share a common position on these issues. Xi even threw out the diplomatic rhetoric that a confrontation between the U.S. and China would be a “disaster. He even said that the issues of Hong Kong, Xinjiang and Taiwan are internal affairs, warning Washington to be careful what it says and does.
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