Why Secretary of State Blinken’s meeting with China’s president was important

It has been five years since an American secretary of state has visited China, and in those years relations between the two nuclear and economic superpowers have soured dramatically.

Nixon in China it wasn’t. There were no breakthroughs on Taiwan, Xinjiang, or spy balloons. Perhaps those difficult topics were barely broached. But don’t be deceived by the modest scope of Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s chat with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing on Monday: In diplomatic terms, the meeting was critically important. And so was its timing.

It has been five years since an American secretary of state has visited China, and in those years relations between the two nuclear and economic superpowers have soured dramatically.

There was the pandemic, which former president Donald Trump called the “Chinese virus” and used to stoke trade tensions. There was a drumbeat of allegations about Chinese spying, whether via a base in Cuba, TikTok, or balloons. And most alarmingly, tensions flared in the Taiwan Strait, as China conducted massive naval and air exercises while President Biden broke with decades of strategic ambiguity by vowing to defend Taiwan against invasion.

Blinken and Xi’s meeting only scratched the surface of those problems. It ended with promises of more talks on trade and climate issues, and with calls for loosening restrictions on air travel and student exchanges. That is a good start, but only a start.

Most importantly, the meeting lowered the heat on US-China relations, and not a moment too soon. The 2024 presidential campaign is well underway and China is sure to be near the top of the foreign policy agenda, particularly for Republicans looking for ways to make Biden look weak. The president is already taking the bait, going out of his way to refer to Xi as a “dictator” at a fundraiser Tuesday.

Already China bashing is de rigueur in Congress and in many state legislatures, usually led by Republicans but often with Democratic support. Among the hundreds of bills before Congress dealing with American policies toward China, only a handful call for a cooling of tensions, such as by restoring Fulbright fellowships for Chinese students, said Jake Werner, a historian and East Asia expert at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a think tank that advocates diplomatic cooperation over military action.

In state capitals across the country, legislators are also considering or have enacted bills that would block the use of TikTok and prevent state universities from starting partnership with certain countries, including China. More than two dozen legislatures are debating measures to prevent Chinese nationals from purchasing land.

What is most alarming about these bills is the anti-Chinese rhetoric that supporters casually employ. In May, Florida enacted legislation that prohibits many Chinese companies and nationals from buying farm land or land near “critical infrastructure” or military bases. In signing the bill, Governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican presidential candidate, praised the restrictions even as he effectively equated Chinese students, tech workers, and other legal immigrants with the Chinese Communist Party.

“I’m proud to sign this legislation to stop the purchase of our farmland and land near our military bases and critical infrastructure by Chinese agents,” he said in a press release titled, “Governor Ron DeSantis Cracks Down on Communist China.”

To Asian Americans, such comments sound alarmingly like the broad-brush language used to discriminate against and then exclude Asian immigrants to the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, culminating with the internment of thousands of Japanese Americans during World War II.

“The message is: If you are from China, you are potentially considered an agent of the Chinese Communist Party,” said Edgar Chen, a policy adviser to the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association. “And that is a big concern in the community.”

Muscular, borderline belligerent rhetoric is beginning to spill over into the presidential campaign as Republicans increasingly press Biden on China. “They are testing us,” Vivek Ramaswamy, a Republican presidential candidate, declared recently on Fox News, referring to China. “And right now, they sense our weakness. We need to project strength.”

Projecting strength will require declaring “economic independence” from China, Ramaswamy asserts. But truly decoupling from China is a pipe dream. This is a country that supplies about 85 percent of our lithium batteries, is our fourth-largest supplier of medicines, and is among our largest sources of fish. China owns nearly $870 billion in US treasury securities, second only to Japan. Its scientists have helped create American companies and its tourists have spent lavishly at American restaurants and hotels. Without China, the United States couldn’t even have produced enough N-95 masks in the first months of the pandemic. The two nations’ economies are, as Elon Musk put it, “conjoined.”

So how to manage such a fraught rivalry? Yes, toughness matters. And yes, the United States should re-shore some of the manufacturing it spent decades sending to Asia, including advanced semiconductors. But simple China bashing, for all its emotional appeal, is not an effective path. History has shown that reflexively portraying a strategic competitor as a malign enemy is a good way for rival countries to stumble into war almost by accident.

Jake Werner, of the Quincy Institute, argues that US-China relations now are less like the US-Soviet conflicts of the Cold War and more like the run-up to World War I, when European imperial competition over land and resources spiraled into a pointlessly bloody conflict.

In that context, Blinken’s China trip was vitally important. “This at least opens space for further diplomacy,” Werner said. “Tensions have gotten so bad, to not be talking is very dangerous.”

Now comes the hard part of working out deep differences over human rights, trade, spying, Taiwan, and China’s growing nuclear arsenal. But score one for talking, and here’s hoping that it continues beneath the noise of the 2024 election.