Antony Blinken expected in Beijing for a visit without illusions

Antony Blinken, US Secretary of State, is expected on Sunday 18 June in Beijing. In itself, this visit constitutes an event. In November 2022, Presidents Joe Biden and Xi Jinping, who met on the sidelines of the G20 held in Bali (Indonesia), announced their intention to communicate more to prevent the relationship between their two countries from continuing to deteriorate. However, the discovery, at the end of January, over the United States, of a Chinese spy balloon and its destruction had provoked, at the last moment, the cancellation of the visit that Mr. Blinken was supposed to make to Beijing at the beginning of February .

In March, Antony Blinken had met State Councilor Wang Yi in Munich on the sidelines of the security conference. The latter then met in Vienna with the national security adviser, Jake Sullivan. At the end of May, the US Commerce Secretary, Gina Raimondo, welcomed her Chinese counterpart, Wang Wentao, to Washington, but these contacts met with little response and clearly did not lead to real progress.

Increased tension

A sign of the tensions between the two countries: the new Chinese defense minister, Li Shangfu, even explicitly refused to meet his American counterpart, Lloyd Austin, on the sidelines of the Shangri-La Dialogue, a major international conference on security that will take place held in Singapore in early June. During this conference, a Chinese naval vessel even cut off the course of a US destroyer in the international waters of the Taiwan Strait, further exacerbating tension between Beijing and Washington.

While Xi Jinping received Bill Gates in Beijing on Friday June 16, we don’t know if he will receive Antony Blinken. “You are the first American friend I meet in Beijing this year” the Chinese president reportedly said to the founder of Microsoft, according to the official Chinese press. “We have always placed our hopes in the American people and hoped that the friendship would continue between the peoples of the two countries,” Xi Jinping would have specified. In general, the Chinese insist “friendship among peoples” to get around governments with which they have significant disagreements.

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On Thursday June 15, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced a donation of 50 million dollars (45 million euros) to Chinese institutions – including Tsinghua University in Beijing, from which Xi Jinping is a graduate – to support them in their research on tuberculosis and malaria. Even if they have not met the Chinese number one, other big American bosses have been welcomed with great fanfare in China in recent weeks: Elon Musk (Tesla, Twitter…), Tim Cook (Apple), James Dimon (JPMorgan Chase), Cristiano Amon (Qualcomm). A way for the Chinese authorities to indicate that foreign investments are always welcome in China, but also to drive a wedge between the American business community, in favor of cooperation with Beijing, and the much more reserved political world. According to the Chinese press, there are the “good” Americans, the businessmen hostile to the decoupling of economies, and the “bad” ones, in the pay of the “military-industrial complex”.

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By James Brown

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