By Richard Maude, Executive Director Policy.

Tony Blinken’s recent visit to China is the first by a US Secretary of State in five years – a data point in itself a stark reminder of how low the bilateral relationship has sunk.

How should we read the visit, and what does it mean for Australia?

Blinken’s visit is the latest in a series of diplomatic pushes by the Biden Administration to convince China to engage with the United States within a model of “responsible competition”.

Previous efforts to stabilise the relationship and build cooperation on issues of mutual interest, including a positive meeting between Presidents Biden and Xi Jinping in Bali last year in the margins of the G20, have foundered on mistrust and deep differences.

An already tense relationship deteriorated further in the wake of the 2022 visit to Taiwan by the then Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi.

China curtailed high-level political dialogue, cancelled military-to-military dialogue mechanisms, and suspended bilateral working groups on climate change and drug trafficking.

Beijing continued the diplomatic freeze after its spy balloon was shot down at the end of its chaotic drift across continental America.

Blinken’s visit therefore represents a small break in the weather. The Administration’s objectives are to strengthen high-level channels of communication, reassure China of its strategic intentions (especially on Taiwan) while being clear about areas of disagreement, and restart cooperation on transnational challenges.

Biden is conscious of concerns from many of America’s closest partners about the adversarial state of US-China relations and the risk of competition sliding into conflict, an undercurrent at the May G7 summit in Hiroshima, for all the unity of purpose in the official communique.

China, too, has tactical reasons for wanting to put a floor under the relationship.

Party leaders are grappling with serious external and internal challenges, many of their own making, including difficult relations with China’s major partners across the West and with India, and a post-COVID economic recovery that is seriously anaemic.

Beijing wants visits by the US Treasury and Commerce secretaries. For all the contradictory signals sent by Xi Jinping on control of the private sector, ideological and data security, greater self-reliance, and capturing more of the value chain for Chinese companies, Beijing still courts foreign investment and sees US business as a potential curb on China policy in Washington. It may hope yet to limit the extent of US “de-risking”, including out-bound investment restrictions foreshadowed by the Biden Administration.

Finally, Beijing is looking to Xi’s participation in the APEC summit in San Francisco in November and the likelihood of a meeting with President Biden there, or perhaps earlier at the G20 in India. 

What happened?

Outcomes from the visit were modest but the Biden Administration did not expect otherwise. Blinken described his visit as one part of a process.

There is agreement to keep talking about “guiding principles” for the relationship. China’s foreign minister, Qin Gang, is expected to visit Washington in coming months.  The foreshadowed visits to China by US Treasury Secretary Yellen and Commerce Secretary Raimondo look set to proceed.

The number of direct flights between the United States and China will increase.  People-to-people exchanges were encouraged. China has agreed to consider a working group on controlling trade in the precursor chemicals that are fuelling America’s devastating opioid epidemic, albeit in vague terms.

Re-starting military-to-military talks is a US priority but here Blinken came away empty handed.  And the US read-out of the visit suggests China is not yet prepared to restart working groups on transnational issues like climate change.

Looking ahead

For the reasons set out above, further modest stabilisation of the relationship and high-level dialogue is possible over the course of the year. There are steps each side could take to show goodwill. China could act on some of the most pressing US concerns, like Fentanyl.

Washington could apply a “high walls, small yard” approach to outbound investment regulation.

Still, the story of US-China relations during the Biden Administration has been one of deep differences swinging a wrecking ball through repeated attempts to create a viable modus vivendi between the two great powers. 

Those differences were evident enough during the visit. Blinken spoke of Chinese coercion of Taiwan, Ukraine, the militarisation of the South and East China Seas, Beijing’s “unfair” treatment of US companies in China, and human rights, among others. Blinken said the United States “profoundly, even vehemently” disagreed with China on these issues. 

For its part, China continued to insist that the United States must change its “wrong policies”, return to “rationality” and “avoid strategic accidents”. 

In short, the gulf between Washington and Beijing on the causes of the breakdown in relations and how to manage differences remains vast.

Washington’s starting point is that the US and China inevitably will compete, and compete toughly.  The Biden Administration argues, however, that competition need not end in confrontation or conflict, and that the world both expects and needs China and the United States to work together on global issues.

Xi Jinping is gearing China for a long “struggle” with the United States. The Communist Party believes this is now inevitable. Publicly, however, China rejects competition as the starting point for managing bilateral ties. Beijing wants instead a “different kind of great power relationship”, one in which the United States accepts China as a peer and respects its (self-defined) “core interests”. According to Chinese media, Xi Jinping told Blinken that “major-country competition does not represent the trend of the times”.

Beijing also argues that the collapse of US-China relations is all Washington’s doing, the result of America’s inability to accept China as a peer. China’s self-reinforcing mindset is that it is often wronged, but never wrong on the international stage.

Washington’s toxic political debate on China, one in which all sense of proportionality is often lost, feeds Beijing’s sense of “containment and encirclement”. But the idea that the Communist Party bears no responsibility at all for the state of US-China ties or more broadly for the collapse of trust in China across the West is, of course, incredible.

China increasingly is rigid in its determination to set the terms of its relationship with the United States and the West, rather than make the compromises necessarily for stable and more reciprocal relationships.

The Communist Party appears to fear that compromise will weaken China in the contest with the West, which it is determined to win, and perhaps ultimately the Party’s own position inside China, an unthinkable prospect for its leaders.

China’s sense of itself as a great power, along with the aggrieved nationalism that the Party promotes, also act as brakes on Beijing’s willingness to respond in meaningful ways to Western concerns.

A China that seeks advantage without care for its impact on others is a deadweight on hopes for managed strategic competition. Western policies responding to harmful Chinese behaviours fuel resentment in Beijing and reinforce fears of “suppression”, a circular dynamic that so far has provide impossible to break.

Implications for Australia

Australia’s national interests are served by efforts to cool the white-hot temperature of US-China ties. Less toxic US-China ties would give middle powers like Australia a little strategic breathing room and would be welcomed by Australia’s partners in Southeast Asia and the Pacific. They would support the Albanese government’s attempts to stabilise Australia’s own bilateral relationship and free the trade relationship entirely from coercive measures.

The Biden Administration’s repeated assurances that it does not seek to decouple the US economy from China’s, along with Europe’s now dominant “de-risking” narrative, align closely with Australia’s preferences for the economic relationship.

Still, the Blinken visit underlined the large structural faults in US-China relations as much as it did the power of diplomacy to make small gains.

On all current indications, there is little prospect of resolving the fundamental differences in the relationship or of changing the inevitability of a long-term contest with China over power, influence, values, and the shape of global order.

Such an outlook does not free Australia from all restraint. The times require continued vigilance to protect Australia’s sovereignty and national interests, at home, in the Indo-Pacific, and globally. But, especially in such a dangerous period, they also demand calm and disciplined diplomacy.