Xi and Blinken trade small nods over a large gap

The areas where the United States and China can work together seem to be shrinking fast, and the risks of confrontation are growing. But it was clear Friday that both countries are trying to salvage what they can.

Preserving some semblance of cooperation — and the difficulty of doing so — was at the heart of a meeting between Secretary of State Antony Blinken and China’s leader, Xi Jinping, in Beijing on Friday. It was the latest effort by the rivals to keep communications open even as disputes escalate over trade, national security and geopolitical frictions.

Officials in both countries said they had made progress on a few smaller, pragmatic fronts, including setting up the first U.S.-China talks on artificial intelligence in the coming weeks. They also said they would continue improving communications between their militaries and increase cultural exchanges.

But on fundamental strategic issues, each side held little hope of moving the other, and they appeared wary of the possibility of sliding into further conflict.

China has accused the United States of working to stifle its technological progress and encircle Chinese interests in the Pacific.

The Biden administration is deeply concerned that cheap Chinese exports are endangering U.S. jobs, and is threatening more sanctions on China if Beijing does not roll back its support of Russia in its war in Ukraine.

“Russia would struggle to sustain its assault on Ukraine without China’s support,” Blinken said at a predeparture news conference Friday. “I made clear that if China does not address this problem, we will.”

Blinken said he had pressed China to take further actions to stem the flow of materials used to make fentanyl, including prosecuting those who were selling chemicals and equipment.

He said the issue of TikTok, the Chinese-owned social media platform that faces a potential U.S. ban in nine to 12 months under a law passed this week, did not come up.

In a sign of how the countries’ relations — which hit perhaps their lowest point in decades last year — had stabilized in recent months, Chinese officials struck a more conciliatory tone Friday than they had during Blinken’s last visit, in June.

“China is happy to see a confident, open, prosperous and thriving United States,” Xi told Blinken, according to a Chinese Foreign Ministry readout. “We hope the U.S. can also look at China’s development in a positive light.”

Blinken told Xi that he hoped to move forward on agreements on topics where Xi and President Joe Biden had agreed to cooperate after they met near San Francisco in November.

“We are committed to maintaining and strengthening lines of communication to advance that agenda and again deal responsibly with our differences so we avoid any miscommunications, any misperceptions, any miscalculations,” Blinken said.

Still, more factors appear to be driving the two countries apart than keeping them together. Geopolitical disputes in Ukraine and the Middle East have presented new challenges. With an election approaching in the United States, the Biden administration is under pressure to offer more protections for American factories against Chinese imports.

Xi told Blinken that “the international situation is fluid and turbulent,” and that the United States and China should “honor words with actions, rather than say one thing but do the opposite,” according to the Chinese readout.

China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, who spent over five hours with Blinken on Friday, was more blunt, warning that negative factors in the relationship were “increasing and building.”

In recent weeks, U.S. officials have begun more urgently raising concerns about China’s economic assistance to Russia and have held out the possibility of further sanctions, including on the Chinese banks that have financed the trade.

Blinken said Friday that the Chinese support for Russia was creating a threat not just to Ukraine, but to Europe more broadly, and that European leaders shared those concerns.

“All I can tell you is I was extremely clear about our concerns in some detail,” he said. “But we’ll have to see what actions follow from that.”

In a briefing with reporters in mid-April, a senior Biden administration official said China had provided Russia with significant quantities of semiconductors, drones and industrial materials. That was helping to fill critical gaps in Russian supply chains that might otherwise cripple Russia’s war effort, causing the Russian military sector to expand more quickly than U.S. officials had believed possible.

China has denied providing weapons to Russia, which Washington has said would be a red line. Otherwise, though, Chinese officials have shown little inclination to scale back their ties with Russia. On Thursday, soon after Blinken arrived in Beijing from Shanghai, President Vladimir Putin of Russia announced that he would visit China in May, in probably his first overseas trip since securing reelection last month.

Asked about Putin’s announcement at a routine news briefing Friday, a spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry said he had no information to provide.

Trade frictions between the countries also continue to simmer, as U.S. officials consider adding new tariffs on Chinese imports and restricting more exports of technology to China because of national security concerns.

Economic ties between the countries have long provided a source of strength for the relationship, a point Blinken reiterated while meeting with business executives in Shanghai on Thursday.

But with American businesses calling for more protections against China, and the prospect of a return of Donald Trump to the presidency, economic issues could turn more explosive.

To jump-start the economy, Xi and other Chinese leaders are stoking factory production and exports. But American leaders believe they must protect U.S. manufacturing, particularly the new factories making semiconductors, solar panels and car batteries in which the Biden administration is investing tens of billions of dollars this year.

At his news conference, Blinken said that China alone was producing more than 100% of global demand for products such as solar panels and electric vehicles, and was responsible for one-third of global production but only one-tenth of global demand.

“This is a movie that we’ve seen before, and we know how it ends,” he said. “With American businesses shuttered and American jobs lost.”

Wang also saved some of his sharpest words for U.S. trade policy. “The United States has adopted an endless stream of measures to suppress China’s economy, trade, science and technology,” he told Blinken during their meeting, according to the Chinese Foreign Ministry. “This is not fair competition but containment, and is not removing risks but creating risks.”