Blinken and Xi agree on need to ‘stabilise’ US-China relationship

The United States and China have agreed to stabilise their relationship and intensify high-level contacts following visit to Beijing by secretary of state Antony Blinken that both sides described as positive.

Greeting Mr Blinken in the Great Hall of the People on Monday, President Xi Jinping said he hoped to put the relationship back on the path he and US president Joe Biden agreed last November.

“The two sides agreed to follow through the common understandings President Biden and I had reached in Bali. The two sides have also made progress and reached the agreement on some specific issues. This is very good,” he said.

Mr Xi said the world needed a stable relationship between China and the United States, adding that the two countries had a responsibility to deal with one another responsibly.

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“Whether China and the US can get along correctly has a bearing on the future and the destiny of humankind,” he said.

“China respects the interests of the United States and will not challenge or replace the United States. Similarly, the United States must also respect China and not harm China’s legitimate rights and interests. Neither party can shape the other according to its own wishes, let alone deprive the other of its legitimate right to development.”

Mr Blinken’s 35-minute meeting with Mr Xi came at the end of two days of talks, during which he also met China’s foreign minister Qin Gang and the country’s most senior diplomat Wang Yi.

The two sides agreed that other senior US officials will visit China in the coming weeks and that Mr Qin will visit Washington.

They agreed to increase the number of direct flights between the two countries and to step up student and academic exchanges and other people-to-people contacts.

But Mr Blinken failed to persuade his Chinese hosts to establish a crisis military-to-military communications channel to avoid unintentional clashes in the seas around China.

“Progress is hard, it takes time, and it’s not the product of one visit, one trip, one conversation. My hope and expectation is we will have better communications, better engagement going forward,” he told a press conference at the US embassy in Beijing.

“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. It’s in the interest of the United States to do that. It’s in the interest of China to do that. It’s in the interests of the world. And I think we took a positive step in that direction over the last two days.”

Mr Blinken said he had sought to reassure his Chinese counterparts that the US is not seeking to contain China economically as it limits the export of some technologies, including semiconductors. And he pointed out that the volume of trade between the US and China reached $700 billion last year, its highest figure ever.

“One of the important things for me to do on this trip was to disabuse our Chinese hosts of the notion that we are seeking to economically contain them,” he said.

“We are not about decoupling, we’re about de-risking and diversifying. And here’s what I mean by that first, when it comes to decoupling or economic containment, I think the facts simply belie that proposition.”

Making the first visit to China by a US secretary of state in five years, Mr Blinken held more than seven-and-a-half hours of “candid” and “constructive” talks with Mr Qin on Sunday.

But, they appeared to make little concrete progress on the wide ranging disputes, which included Taiwan, trade, human rights, stemming the flow of synthetic opioid fentanyl and its precursor chemicals from China, or over their differing viewpoints regarding the war in Ukraine.

Mr Blinken stressed “the need to reduce the risk of misperception and miscalculation” in his talks with Mr Qin.

The trip, which was postponed in February after a suspected Chinese spy balloon flew over US airspace, is closely followed worldwide as further deterioration of ties between the world’s two largest economies could have global implications on financial markets, trade practices and routes and supply chains.