High-level meeting shows China and Xi

Jake Sullivan has arrived in China for his first visit as U.S. national security adviser, where he will hold talks with Foreign Minister Wang Yi as the two countries seek to stabilize relations.

Sullivan and Wang have met four times in 16 months, in Vienna, Malta, Washington and Bangkok. Their last meeting, in January, came shortly after a high-stakes summit between Presidents Xi Jinping and Joe Biden aimed at repairing strained relations.

This week’s talks, scheduled for Tuesday and Wednesday, indicate that China remains a priority for the Biden administration, even as the outgoing president enters his final months in office.

Is another summit planned?

The White House is careful not to explicitly link Mr. Sullivan’s trip to the U.S. presidential election. But the timing is hard to ignore.

If Sullivan can lay the groundwork for a final summit between Biden and Xi, his trip would seal the most important — and most fraught — foreign policy relationship the president has ever had.

American and Chinese diplomats always acknowledge that negotiations between Washington and Beijing are never easy. And there is much to be said.

With the unexpected turn of the US elections, with Biden losing to Kamala Harris, China is closely watching what the next presidency might have in store for it.

Donald Trump has made it clear that he will further increase tariffs on Chinese goods, which could make the situation worse. trade war he started in 2019.

While Mr Biden’s administration has seen the value in diplomacy, he has stopped short of rolling back Trump-era tariffs and added more in May he announced high duties on electric cars, solar panels and steel made in China.

Mr Biden has also strengthened his alliances across Asia to combating China’s growing influence and has strengthened Washington’s military presence – which, in turn, has shaken Beijing.

So far, Harris’ campaign has not given many clues about how she plans to handle relations with China.

The White House made clear that Mr. Sullivan’s visit was intended to continue the work of the Biden administration, rather than set the tone for the next president.

But China is probably looking to the future anyway.

Beijing will use the opportunity to clarify its priorities with Sullivan. It hopes all parties in the United States will listen. China’s foreign ministry called the meeting a “critical moment” between the world’s two largest economies.

For China, the red line is and always will be Taiwan. It claims autonomy for the island and has repeatedly said it will not tolerate any signs that Washington is pushing for Taiwanese independence.

High-level diplomatic visits, including a controversial one by Nancy Pelosi, then Speaker of the House of Representatives in 2022, or recognition of Taiwan’s elections or its elected leaders, fall into this category.

Chinese state media said Beijing would make efforts to express its serious concerns, clarify its position and make serious demands on issues such as the “Taiwan question.”

China will also have harsh words for Sullivan on trade. Beijing has called U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods “unreasonable” and urged Washington to “stop politicizing and securitizing economic and trade issues” and “take more measures to facilitate people-to-people exchanges between the two countries.”

When he took office, Mr Biden wanted to restore balance in relations with China, after what he saw as the chaos and unpredictability of the Trump White House.

His administration has sought to “responsibly manage” the rivalry with Beijing, demonstrating American power and competition with China through discretion, not bravado.

But this strategy was disrupted by the turmoil of events.

Last year, the crisis engulfed the direct relationship when a US fighter jet shoots down suspected Chinese spy balloon on American territory.

The wars in Ukraine and the Middle East have further sharpened the tone.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken traveled to Beijing in April with a warning that Washington would act if China did not stop supplying Russia with microchips and machine parts to build weapons used in its war in Ukraine.

He accused his Chinese counterparts of “helping fuel the greatest threat” to European security since the Cold War.

His warning materialized in a series of sanctions against Chinese companies because of their alleged support for the Russian military.

It is a sensitive issue that China has consistently tried to avoid, but Washington is insistent, and Mr. Sullivan is likely to raise it again.

China’s growing assertiveness in Asia has also made the United States wary of the impact of those ties beyond its borders — particularly with Iran, which is allied with Moscow and also arming Israel’s adversaries.

Finally, in the United States, there is the devastating national impact of “precursor” chemicals manufactured in China to make synthetic opioids like fentanyl, which are causing overdoses. killing more Americans than ever before and the crisis has devastated entire cities.

Last year’s summit between Biden and Xi in San Francisco was supposed to make progress on these issues.

Since then, despite tariffs and harsh rhetoric, Washington and Beijing have acknowledged their differences – and reports that the two sides have reached an agreement to reduce fentanyl production are a good sign.

In April, when the BBC accompanied US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on his visit to Shanghai and Beijing, public evidence of some of his meetings with senior Chinese officials resembled a bitter confrontation.

It was a show of diplomatic force aimed at domestic public opinion on both sides. And it will undoubtedly be part of Mr. Sullivan’s trip as he tries to bolster Mr. Biden’s diplomacy in the final months of his presidency.

But these meetings have another fundamental objective: to allow two rival and interdependent economies to meet face to face, to combat their mutual distrust and to try to probe the other’s true intentions.

It appears that Jake Sullivan’s previous meetings with Wang Yi have quietly laid the foundation for what both sides call “stable relations.”

In a recent speech to the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, Mr. Sullivan said that he and Mr. Wang had “increasingly been able to put aside talking points and have real strategic conversations.”

He described the nature of these conversations as “direct,” including one about the war in Ukraine.

“We both left feeling that we didn’t agree on everything, but that there was a lot of work to do.”