The State Department announced Wednesday (March 10) that top U.S. and Chinese officials will meet at a high level in Alaska next week. This is the first face-to-face meeting between senior U.S. and Chinese officials since President Biden took office. Some analysts believe that if China remains the same old story on U.S.-China relations at this meeting, there will be no positive outcome.
The State Department said Secretary Blinken and National Security Adviser Sullivan will meet with Yang Jiechi, a member of the Communist Party’s Political Bureau in charge of foreign affairs, and State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Anchorage, Alaska, on March 18 to discuss “a range of issues.
In a hearing before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Wednesday, Blinken said the meeting would be an opportunity to lay out U.S. concerns to Beijing in a “frank” manner.
“We intend to, and will, raise a lot of issues,” he said. He said the talks will also explore whether there are avenues for cooperation with Beijing.
It was the first meeting between top U.S. and Chinese officials since the two leaders spoke by phone last month.
The meeting between top U.S. and Chinese officials comes ahead of visits to Japan and South Korea by Defense Secretary Austin and Secretary of State Blinken. President Biden will also hold his first Quadripartite Leaders’ Meeting with the leaders of India, Japan and Australia this Friday. The “Quad” is seen as an effort to strengthen U.S. diplomatic influence in Asia and to counterbalance China’s growing economic and military clout in the Indo-Pacific region.
White House spokeswoman Sharkey said Wednesday that the Biden Administration will approach relations with the Chinese Communist Party in lockstep with its allies. She said, “It’s very important to us that this administration’s first meeting with Chinese Communist Party officials is on U.S. soil and comes after we’ve met and consulted closely with our allies and partners in Asia and Europe.”
Bonnie Glaser, director of the China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, argued that such an arrangement would show Beijing that the United States has a strong alliance.
“The Biden administration made this arrangement to show that Washington is engaging [with the Chinese Communist Party] from a position of strength,” she told Voice of America via email.
She believes that high-level U.S.-China talks will likely focus primarily on areas where the two sides disagree, including the Communist Party’s 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 former Trump administration’s hard-line stance against the CCP on a number of issues, including maintaining its determination that the CCP 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 CCP’s lack of transparency in handling the CCP virus outbreak, and accusing China of unfair practices in trade and commerce.
President Biden touched on these issues during a phone call with Communist Party President Xi Jinping last month, but the two sides do not appear to share a common position on these issues. Xi said the confrontation between the U.S. and China is a “disaster” and said the issues of Hong Kong, Xinjiang and Taiwan are internal affairs of the Communist Party and involve its core interests, so Washington should proceed with caution.
The last Time the U.S. and China met face-to-face at a high level was during the Trump Administration. Last June, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Yang Jiechi held talks in Hawaii, but the two sides did not reach substantive results.
Bilateral relations between the U.S. and China have deteriorated under Trump, and since Biden became president, top Chinese Communist Party officials have been releasing signals that they want to “reset” U.S.-China relations, but Beijing has blamed the U.S. for the problems in bilateral relations, urging the U.S. to “move in the same direction” as the Chinese Communist Party and to “work together” with the Chinese Communist Party. Beijing has put the blame for the problems in the bilateral relationship squarely on the U.S., urging the U.S. to “move in the right direction” with the CCP and “grasp the right direction of U.S.-China relations.
According to Gloria, the talks will not have a positive outcome if the Chinese Communist Party continues to repeat the same old rhetoric in this meeting.
She said, “If Chinese officials repeat what they have said in recent speeches, that the blame for problems in the U.S.-China relationship lies with the United States and that the ball is on the U.S. side, then this meeting will not have a positive outcome.”
Patrick M. Cronin, chairman of the Asia-Pacific Security Program at the Hudson Institute, a think tank, believes the meeting may simply restart the dialogue.
Both sides want to communicate their next priorities and principles,” he told Voice of America via email. Because both leaders will have to focus on domestic matters for a year or more afterward, they have a common interest in making sure that this important relationship maintains some stability. To show that neither side will be at the mercy of the other, there are limited areas for reaching quick agreements. But to try to show that the two governments can still make a difference in the midst of competition, it is conceivable that the talks will end with a commitment to expand the bilateral dialogue process and perhaps highlight a few areas of common interest.”
The Wall Street Journal quoted a Biden administration official as saying that the goal of the high-level U.S.-China meeting is to exchange views on both sides’ expectations and plans for their respective domestic politics, as well as international, regional and global goals, and that topics will include the Chinese Communist Party’s virus Epidemic, climate change, as well as Hong Kong and Taiwan issues on which the two sides disagree, and the Chinese Communist Party’s economic crackdown on Australia.
Beijing hopes to establish various dialogue mechanisms with Washington to avoid miscalculation. In a congressional hearing Wednesday, Blinken said next week’s U.S.-China meeting will not be a return to the high-level dialogue format of the past. The U.S. and China have had strategic and economic dialogues in the past, as well as comprehensive economic dialogues, but such high-level dialogue mechanisms are increasingly seen as having little success in addressing Washington’s concerns.
There is no intention at this stage to have a series of follow-up contacts,” Blinken said. If there is, it has to be based on the condition that, that is, that we see tangible progress and tangible results on those topics of concern that we have with the Chinese Communist Party.”
Recent Comments