Diplomatic tango: Blinken heads to China. But thawing relations will take more than a meeting

The setting: Alaska. The date: March 2021. The purpose: cooperation. The Biden administration was barely into its second month. These were the first high-level talks with China. Yet the tone was hostile.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken ? who is visiting China on Sunday and Monday after a planned trip in February was abruptly canceled ? said in blunt opening remarks as he glanced across the table in Anchorage to Yang Jiechi, a senior Chinese foreign policy official, that the U.S. aimed to "discuss our deep concerns with actions by China." He then ticked off those concerns: Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Taiwan, cyberattacks, economic coercion of U.S. allies. "Each of these actions threaten the rules-based order that maintains global stability," he said.

Yang shot back: "The wars in this world are launched by some other countries," he argued, referring to the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. "But for China, what we have asked for, for other countries, is to follow a path of peaceful development, and this is the purpose of our foreign policy."

He then settled into his theme. "Many people within the United States actually have little confidence in the democracy of the United States," Yang said, adding that Black Americans were being "slaughtered" on U.S. streets. Washington had, in his view, no right to lecture China about human rights.

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America's top diplomat Antony Blinken goes to China

Blinken's trip to China marks the first visit to the country for a U.S. secretary of state in five years.

Since that somewhat undiplomatic 2021 exchange between diplomats in Alaska, the U.S.-China relationship has continued to be dogged by tensions.

The U.S. shot down a weather ballon in February ? the incident that nixed Blinken's trip that month ? that the Biden Administration characterized as “part of a larger Chinese surveillance-balloon program." Last week, the White House confirmed that U.S. intelligence has been aware, since 2019, of a China spying base in Cuba. There have been tense encounters between American and Chinese navies in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea.

Washington and Beijing have also feuded about the popular video-sharing app, TikTok, which is owned by China; the U.S. sees it as a security threat because of the potential to expose sensitive information about American users and the American government. And several U.S. states are weighing legislation that would ban Chinese citizens from buying U.S. real estate and companies, a move critics say could be discriminatory.

"We’re coming to Beijing with a realistic, confident approach and a sincere desire to manage our competition the most responsible way possible. We do hope at a minimum that we will achieve that goal, and we also do hope of course to make progress on a number of concrete issues,” Daniel Kritenbrink, assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, told reporters before Blinken's trip. "It would be wise not to have expectations of a long list of deliverables because that’s not where we are, I think, in the bilateral relationship."

In one sign of how strained U.S.-China relations have gotten in recent years, though the COVID pandemic has also played a role, there are just 350 American students studying in China, down from 15,000 a decade ago, according to State Department figures. About 300,000 Chinese nationals are enrolled in higher education courses at U.S. colleges and China remains the top source of international students in the U.S., but these numbers too have been falling sharply in recent years, according to U.S. Embassy and Consulate figures.

What's it going to take to improve U.S.-China relations?

Yet some American and Chinese experts, and at least one official, say that more, not less, civilian-to-civilian contact in the form of student exchanges, cultural link-ups and business cooperation is precisely what's needed to put relations between the two economic, technological and military superpowers on a better footing, and for them to thrive ? not just relatively brief high-level contact between diplomats.

Young people from the U.S. and China “need to have a familiarity with each other,” Nicholas Burns, the U.S. ambassador to China, said in an NBC interview last month in Beijing during an event aimed at students.

“You want the two countries’ people to be talking to each other, and 20-year-olds probably do that best,” he said. “They achieve a degree of familiarity and expertise in a country that is lifelong.”

Wang Huiyao, a senior adviser to China's former Vice Premier Liu He who is also the director of the Center for China and Globalization, a Beijing tank think, said that both countries need to encourage more "think tank visits, more people visits, more flights, to issue more visas, to socialize more ? this will help change the mood."

Lyle Goldstein, runs the Asia program at Defense Priorities, a Washington think tank, agrees.

"U.S.-China trade continues to set records and a lot of Americans benefit from this," he said. "Farmers in the Midwest are huge beneficiaries of Chinese demand for soybeans. China is hungry for resources and they know Americans deliver quality and efficiency. Americans continue to be technological leaders. Our universities are the top in the world. We need to work collaboratively. A lot of the discussion about decoupling has gone way too far."

Goldstein recently returned from a trip to China in April, one of numerous over the course of his career.

An an expert in China's military, he said that while Beijing has been "sobered a bit" by Russia's invasion of Ukraine, China's military is "more or less ready (militarily) to (invade Taiwan) and waiting for the order."

Biden has said the U.S. would defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion of the territory that Beijing views as part of China but which has been governed independently since 1949.

But Goldstein said that because that order has not yet come (and may never materialize), Blinken should use his trip to China to focus on areas where the U.S. and China can work together and overcome their differences: "Engagement doesn't solve all problems. It's not going to turn China into a Jeffersonian democracy. But it can take the edges off (tensions) and hopefully help avoid a cataclysmic and catastrophic war."

Can one country do the diplomatic tango?

Some of this cooperation may be starting to ramp up.

On Friday, Microsoft's co-founder Bill Gates became the latest high-profile American business leader to visit China since its border reopened after the pandemic. Elon Musk (Tesla and Twitter), Jamie Dimon (J.P. Morgan) and Tim Cook (Apple) have all travelled to the country this year for meetings with senior Chinese officials.

The U.S. and China have resumed formal talks about battling the climate emergency.

Last month, President Joe Biden alluded to an imminent "thaw" in U.S.-China relations, though it now seems apparent he was likely referring to Blinken's visit, not substantive alterations to facts on the ground.

"The U.S., more than any other country I know, is a place where foreign affairs are undertaken by the people in various ways. This is nongovernment organizations, its business, media, universities and so forth," said Robert Sutter, a professor of international affairs and expert on U.S.-China relations at George Washington University.

"And they all have their own actions in foreign policy and the government doesn't control them. Democracies are inherently like this, of course, but the U.S. is sort of extreme in this regard. It's a feature of American history."

However, Sutter said these dealings "take two to tango."

He did not think China, which "really controls its foreign policy," operated in the same way. "They control and condition their people. So we have an issue here of trying to sustain these people-to-people contacts."

Wang, the adviser to China's former premier, raised another point.

"This moment (Blinken's trip) should have come when Biden won the election. Now the window seems pretty short to stabilize the relationship before the next U.S. election campaign and China-bashing heats up."

More: Suspected Chinese spies, disguised as tourists, tried to infiltrate Alaskan military bases

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Blinken trip to China may not thaw tensions. Here is what could.