Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Monday, rounding out a high-stakes trip to Beijing that the U.S. hopes will help ease the mounting tensions between the two countries.
Xi’s willingness to meet with Blinken is a signal from the top of the ruling Chinese Communist Party that Beijing wants to move past the acrimony that has curdled U.S.-China ties since the Chinese spy balloon episode in February. Xi’s conversation with Blinken — on the heels of the secretary’s meeting with Foreign Minister Qin Gang on Sunday, which affirmed both a follow-up discussion in Washington later this year and a need to bolster U.S.-China people-to-people exchanges — reflects Beijing’s desire to resume high-level official contacts despite festering disagreements over issues including Taiwan’s status and China’s role in America’s opioid overdose epidemic.
In a statement delivered ahead of the meeting, Xi hailed the “candid discussions” Blinken had with Chinese officials, and said that China had agreed “to follow through the common understandings” he and President Joe Biden reached when they met in Indonesia in November.
Blinken thanked Xi for hosting him, and spoke of the “obligation and responsibility” the two countries have to manage tensions between them.
That relationship is “one of the most consequential in the world,” he said during a news conference before wrapping up the trip.
“Here in Beijing, I had important conversations with President Xi, and I had added substantive and constructive discussions with my counterparts,” Blinken said.
The roughly 35-minute meeting with Xi in the Great Hall of the People was seen as a critical sign to the trip’s success, though it wasn’t confirmed ahead of time. After Xi met with Microsoft founder Bill Gates earlier this month, a failure to organize a Xi-Blinken meeting might have constituted a deliberate snub by Chinese authorities.
“If Xi had refused to meet with Blinken, it would have signaled that the Chinese leader was abandoning the diplomatic exchange process he agreed to with Biden last fall,” said Jacob Stokes, a senior fellow for Indo-Pacific issues at the Center for a New American Security. “So, the fact that it happened probably means more than the outcomes.”
During his meetings, Blinken said, he touched on several topics including tensions over Taiwan, North Korean aggression, trade, human rights, the war in Ukraine and wrongfully detained U.S. citizens. He also spoke with Chinese leaders about areas where the two powerful countries share a mutual interest, including the climate, macroeconomic stability, public health and food security.
Despite the promise of continued conversations among high-level U.S. and Chinese officials, China did not agree to open military-to-military lines of communication, Blinken told CBS News in an interview.
“We don’t have an agreement on that yet. It’s something we’re going to keep working [on],” Blinken said.
State Department officials did not expect the countries to reach a breakthrough on any of the issues in which they’re most divided. The administration described Blinken’s trip as part of a longer-term effort to cool the bilateral rancor that has effectively frozen high-level diplomatic dialogue for almost five months.
Though the trip is a sign of abating tensions, Blinken noted that the two countries were still deeply divided.
“Progress is hard. It takes time and [it’s] not the product of one visit, one trip, one conversation,” he told reporters.
“My hope and expectation is we will have better communications, better engagement going forward. That’s certainly not going to solve every problem between us — far from it. But it is critical to doing what we both agree is necessary. And that is responsibly managing the relationship.”
Alexander Ward contributed to this report.
