Blinken and Xi pledge to fix US-China ties

BEIJING — U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken met on Monday with Chinese President Xi Jinping and said they agreed to “stabilize” badly deteriorated U.S.-China ties, but America’s top diplomat left Beijing with his biggest ask rebuffed: better communications between their militaries.

After meeting Xi, Blinken said China is not ready to resume militaryto-military contacts, something the U.S. considers crucial to avoid miscalculation and conflict, particularly over Taiwan.

Still, China’s main diplomat for the Western Hemisphere, Yang Tao, said he thought Blinken’s visit to China “marks a new beginning.”

“The U.S. side is surely aware of why there is difficulty in military-tomilitary exchanges,” he said, blaming the issue squarely on U.S. sanctions, which Blinken said revolved entirely around threats to American security.

Yet Blinken and Xi pronounced themselves satisfied with progress made during the two days of talks, without pointing to specific areas of agreement beyond a mutual decision to return to a broad agenda for cooperation and competition endorsed last year year by Xi and President Joe Biden at a summit in Bali.

And, it remained unclear if those understandings can resolve their most important disagreements, many of which have international implications. Still, both men said they were pleased with the outcome of the highest-level U.S. visit to China in five years.

The two sides expressed a willingness to hold more talks, but there was little indication that either is prepared to bend from positions on issues including trade, Taiwan, human rights conditions in China and Hong Kong, Chinese military assertiveness in the South China Sea, and Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Blinken later said the U.S. set limited objectives for the trip and achieved them. He told reporters before leaving for a Ukraine reconstruction conference in London that he had raised the issue of military-tomilitary communications “repeatedly.”

“It is absolutely vital that we have these kinds of communications,” he said. “This is something we’re going to keep working on.”

Speaking to reporters Monday during a campaign fundraising trip to California, Biden said Blinken did a “hell of a job.” The president said “you know” progress was made with relations between the U.S. and China because of the meeting.

The U.S. has said that, since 2021, China has declined or failed to respond to more than a dozen requests from the Department of Defense for top-level dialogues.

According to a transcript of the meeting with Blinken, Xi said he was pleased with the outcome of Blinken’s earlier meetings with top Chinese diplomats and said restarting the Bali agenda were of great importance.