U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken hosted talks on Friday with a senior Chinese Communist Party (CCP) official who is widely expected to be tapped as Beijing’s next foreign minister, as tensions between the two countries loom ahead of Taiwan’s elections this weekend.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken hosted talks on Friday with a senior Chinese Communist Party (CCP) official who is widely expected to be tapped as Beijing’s next foreign minister, as tensions between the two countries loom ahead of Taiwan’s elections this weekend.
Blinken met with Liu Jianchao for closed-door meetings at the State Department on Friday, capping off a series of meetings between U.S. officials and their Chinese counterparts aimed at calming ties between the world’s two superpowers. Liu, who leads the CCP’s diplomatic wing, is among a small coterie of top trusted advisors to Chinese President Xi Jinping and is predicted to be China’s next foreign minister, current and former U.S. officials told Foreign Policy.
Blinken’s meeting with Liu follows another recent milestone in U.S.-China ties: U.S. and Chinese military officials met at the Pentagon this week to hold their first formal dialogue in more than two years. Current and former officials also say U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, are expected to meet again in February or March to maintain a steady pace of dialogue between the two countries, though neither side has publicly announced whether or when such a meeting will take place.
The big question is how long this cooldown in the brewing new cold war between Washington and Beijing can last and whether routine dialogue between U.S. and Chinese officials will continue if a new crisis in the relationship erupts—from a forceful Chinese reaction to Taiwan’s upcoming elections to more military showdowns between China’s military and the Philippines, a close U.S. ally with which it has a formal defense treaty.
“It’s very early days. We don’t know whether this stability will hold,” said Bonnie Glaser, an expert on U.S.-China relations at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. “The question is what happens if there’s a crisis. I think the U.S.-China relationship remains very fragile and could be disrupted by many things.”
The steady drumbeat of bilateral meetings follows U.S. President Joe Biden’s meeting with Xi on the sidelines of a major diplomatic summit in San Francisco last November, where they vowed to calm tensions and restart regular government dialogue. Prior to that, China had frozen diplomatic and military talks with the United States after then-U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan in August 2022—a move that infuriated Beijing.
The U.S. Defense Department this week held two days of discussions with a senior Chinese military official, the first time that such Defense Policy Coordination Talks were held between the two countries since 2021. Michael Chase, the U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for China policy, helmed the discussions with his Chinese counterpart, Maj. Gen. Song Yanchao, who is the deputy director of China’s Office for International Military Cooperation, within the Central Military Commission.
The Pentagon said the meeting “highlighted the importance of maintaining open lines of military-to-military communication in order to prevent competition from veering into conflict.”
One of the highest-risk variables in the U.S.-China relationship is Taiwan. Beijing views Taiwan, an independently governed island, as its own sovereign territory, and many analysts, including some U.S. military officials, fear China will move to retake Taiwan by force sometime in the next few years. Indeed, at the November 2023 meeting between Xi and Biden, the Chinese leader reportedly told the U.S. president that Beijing will reunify Taiwan with China but that the timing has yet to be decided. He also said China would prefer a peaceful reunification over one accomplished by force.
The United States diplomatically recognizes Beijing, not Taiwan, through its so-called “One China” policy but views Taiwan as a key democratic ally in Washington’s looming cold war with Beijing and maintains close military ties with the island. Experts view U.S.-China disputes over Taiwan as one of the most dangerous flashpoints in the bilateral relationship, and all are watching Taiwan’s upcoming elections this weekend—and China’s reaction to those elections—closely. The elections are seen as a referendum on whether Taiwan will continue its hawkish and defiant approach toward China or seek a more accommodating one. Those elections were slated to be at the top of the agenda during the Friday meeting between Blinken and Liu, those current and former officials said.
If Liu is confirmed as China’s next foreign minister—a decision that’s likely to be announced at the National People’s Congress meeting in March, current and former U.S. officials said—his meeting in Washington will lay the groundwork for direct ties with senior Biden administration officials during what could be a tumultuous year in U.S.-China relations.
Both countries are still reeling from the fallout of the spy balloon scandal in early 2023, when the discovery of a Chinese surveillance balloon floating above Montana close to sensitive nuclear sites caused a diplomatic rift between Washington and Beijing. And beyond Taiwan’s elections, the U.S. presidential election will take place in November. To the extent that foreign policy is on the agenda in the presidential campaign season, all Republican candidates have called for a more forceful and hawkish confrontation with China if they win against Biden in the general elections. Current and former U.S. officials say maintaining contacts between the two sides throughout the election cycle will be critical to preventing tensions from spiking, and they point to the Sullivan-Wang relationship as the most important channel in U.S.-China ties beyond Biden and Xi’s personal relationship.
Wang currently serves as both foreign minister and director of the CCP’s foreign affairs office, which makes him China’s current top diplomat. Wang took on the foreign minister role in July 2023, after the previous foreign minister, Qin Gang, abruptly disappeared from public view and was dramatically ousted from his post. Rumors swirled about Qin having an affair with a Chinese television presenter and fathering a child through a surrogate mother in the United States before he was sacked.
Despite the headwinds in the relationship, the Biden administration is hoping to expand U.S.-China contacts in the coming months, particularly on the military side. U.S. officials are hopeful that the talks at the Pentagon this week, as well as Blinken’s meeting with Liu, could pave the way for opening a so-called direct “hotline” between senior U.S. and Chinese military commanders in the near future. Drawing on the U.S. experience with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, the Biden administration views such a hotline between U.S. and Chinese military commanders as crucial to preventing any military mishaps or miscalculations in the Asia-Pacific from spiraling into a full-fledged military showdown.
There is still one yawning gap in U.S.-China talks that has yet to be addressed. Thus far, the United States hasn’t made any headway in getting Beijing to sit down for talks on arms control, as China’s rapidly expanding nuclear arsenal is seen as another major security risk in the bilateral relationship. The Pentagon estimates that China will have more than 1,000 operational nuclear warheads by 2030, according to a report released in late 2023.
U.S.-China Meetings Aim to Defuse Tensions Ahead of Taiwan Election
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12.01.2024
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken hosted talks on Friday with a senior Chinese Communist Party (CCP) official who is widely expected to be tapped as Beijing’s next foreign minister, as tensions between the two countries loom ahead of Taiwan’s elections this weekend.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken hosted talks on Friday with a senior Chinese Communist Party (CCP) official who is widely expected to be tapped as Beijing’s next foreign minister, as tensions between the two countries loom ahead of Taiwan’s elections this weekend.
Blinken met with Liu Jianchao for closed-door meetings at the State Department on Friday, capping off a series of meetings between U.S. officials and their Chinese counterparts aimed at calming ties between the world’s two superpowers. Liu, who leads the CCP’s diplomatic wing, is among a small coterie of top trusted advisors to Chinese President Xi Jinping and is predicted to be China’s next foreign minister, current and former U.S. officials told Foreign Policy.
Blinken’s meeting with Liu follows another recent milestone in U.S.-China ties: U.S. and Chinese military officials met at the Pentagon this week to hold their first formal dialogue in more than two years. Current and former officials also say U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, are expected to meet again in February or March to maintain a steady pace of dialogue between the two countries, though neither side has publicly announced whether or when such a meeting will take place.
The big question is how long this cooldown in the brewing new cold war between Washington and Beijing can last and whether routine dialogue between U.S. and Chinese officials will continue if a new crisis in the relationship erupts—from a forceful Chinese reaction to Taiwan’s upcoming elections to more military showdowns between China’s military and........
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