Blinken meets Xi in Beijing to ease escalating tensions
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Semafor Signals
Insights from the South China Morning Post and Nikkei Asia
The News
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Beijing on Friday. The pair worked to ease tense relations between the two countries, which have sparred in recent months over China’s support of Russia, Chinese manufacturing dominance, and Beijing’s military posturing in the South China Sea.
“I reiterated our serious concern about the PRC providing components that are powering Russia’s brutal war of aggression against Ukraine,” Blinken told reporters after the meeting. Xi, meanwhile, told the US’ top diplomat that “China and the United States should be partners rather than rivals,” Chinese state media reported.
SIGNALS
Tensions between Washington and Beijing likely to intensify
Source: The South China Morning Post
Despite Washington’s attempt to soften ties with Beijing, it’s likely that the two nations’ trade war will intensify in the coming months, Stephen Olson, a senior adjunct fellow at the Pacific Forum, argued in the South China Morning Post. New tariffs on Chinese goods, alongside an investigation into China’s shipbuilding industry, imply that Washington isn’t about to back off from applying economic pressure on Beijing. Talks between Blinken and Xi will be “characterised in typical diplomatic jargon as ‘frank and productive’ and a further indication of growing stability in the relationship,” Olson noted. “The words are intended to reassure, but an escalation in trade tensions is all but certain.”
Chinese support of Russia will keep two sides apart
Source: Nikkei Asia
The US and China remain distant on key issues, particularly Beijing’s material support for Russia’s war in Ukraine. That support, which reportedly includes the sale of Chinese equipment to Moscow, which Russia is then using to produce weapons for its war in Ukraine, has prompted threats of sanctions on Chinese banks involved in transferring funds to Russia. But “Xi Jinping will never agree to putting a stop to supplying dual-use or even semi-lethal weapons to Russia,” Willy Lam, a senior fellow at The Jamestown Foundation, told Nikkei Asia. Xi is a “very ideological person,” he said, and despite China’s flagging economic growth is “still somehow very convinced that at the end of the day, the East is really rising and the West is declining.”
