After Months of Cold Shoulder, China Welcomes Blinken to Beijing

Behind the scenes, however, Beijing has had its own reasons for detente with the U.S.: Chinese officials have said a priority for Beijing this year is to pave the way for top leader Xi Jinping to attend an annual summit of Asia-Pacific leaders to be held in San Francisco in November—and possibly a separate meeting with President Biden. 

Chinese diplomats have been working to ensure the Chinese leader will receive a respectful welcome for what would be his first trip to the U.S. since 2015.

Driving the terse Chinese messaging in the lead-up to Blinken’s visit has been the leadership’s need to explain to a domestic audience why it appears to be shifting to re-engage with the Americans after having given Washington a cold shoulder for months and blamed the U.S. for the worsening bilateral relationship. 

Upon arriving in Beijing, Blinken was greeted by the U.S. ambassador to China, Nicholas Burns, and the director-general at China’s Foreign Ministry overseeing affairs with the U.S. On Sunday, the secretary of state is set to participate in a large-format gathering with China’s Foreign Minister Qin Gang and his team, as well as a smaller meeting and a dinner, a senior State Department official said. 

Blinken is expected to meet Xi during the trip, as is customary with previous visits by U.S. secretaries of state. So far, neither Washington nor Beijing confirmed the potential meeting between Blinken and Xi.

Another key audience for Chinese leaders are the U.S.’s allies in Europe and Asia, as Beijing steps up efforts to try to prevent other countries with advanced technology from joining hands with Washington in sanctioning Chinese firms.

As competition between the U.S. and China heats up, especially over advanced technology, the Biden administration has sought to get countries such as the Netherlands, Japan and South Korea to join with the U.S. in limiting chip-related exports to China. Washington has also been working on restricting investments in sensitive technologies in China—an effort that it hopes will also be supported by its European and Asian partners.

But not everyone is on board. Motivated by their own economic interests in the world’s second-largest economy, some of the U.S.’s allies have pushed back against increasing restrictions on doing business in China and grown worried about the deteriorating U.S.-China relationship. The allies’ concerns have opened a window for Beijing to attempt to put distance between those countries and the U.S. 

“The Chinese expect that there will be further U.S. technology sanctions,” said David Dollar, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former World Bank representative in Beijing. “Part of the Chinese willingness to meet with Blinken and to reopen lines of communication is playing to Europe and other American allies and showing that China is willing to cooperate and stop the downward spiral.”

That, Dollar said, could “reinforce European reluctance to go full in with the U.S. on tech competition with China.”

Blinken spoke with his counterparts from Japan and South Korea during his journey to Beijing, part of an effort to work with U.S. regional allies on China, a senior State Department official said.

Going into this year, both Beijing and Washington were looking to kick-start dialogue over geopolitics, economic, trade and other issues to stabilize the relationship. Then, a suspected Chinese spy balloon crossed North America before the U.S. shot it down in early February, sending relations back into a downward spiral. 

The balloon incident caused Blinken to postpone a scheduled visit to China that was supposed to be the start of a series of high-level exchanges.

In the months since, tensions between the two powers have continued to grow.

Beijing was especially infuriated by what it saw as an attempt by Washington to sabotage its effort to repair its relations with Europe when Wang Yi, the top Chinese foreign-affairs official, traveled to Munich in mid-February for a high-profile security conference, according to people who have consulted with Chinese authorities.

At the Munich conference, Blinken said the U.S. had intelligence that showed China was considering sending weapons to Russia to assist its war on Ukraine—just as Wang was trying to reassure the Europeans of Beijing’s desire for peace. A meeting between Blinken and Wang on the sidelines of the conference went badly, according to people familiar with the matter, with the secretary of state taking Beijing to task over its support for Russia during its Ukraine war as well as the surveillance balloon.

Since then, China had repeatedly rebuffed U.S. requests for high-level talks and blamed all problems between the two nations squarely on Washington.

During a press conference Friday in Brussels, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said that he hadn’t reached out to his Chinese counterpart since they shook hands, but didn’t meet, at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore earlier this month. The U.S. defense chief said he is open to resuming communications between the two military leaders. 

“The door is open. My phone line is open,” Austin said. “I think it’s important that countries with significant military capacity and capabilities have the means to talk to each other so that we can manage potential crises and, and make sure that things aren’t allowed to unnecessarily spiral out of control.”

So far, Beijing has been more interested in having senior economic officials engage with their American counterparts amid a deepening slowdown in the Chinese economy. Last month, Xi sent his commerce minister to Washington for a dinnertime meeting with his U.S. counterpart, Gina Raimondo —the first cabinet-level meeting in Washington between the two countries during the Biden administration. Raimondo and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen have both said they hope to visit China as part of the U.S. effort to maintain high-level communications.

Beijing has had to explain to the Chinese public why senior leaders are pivoting to welcoming the secretary of state after having dragged their feet on rescheduling Blinken’s visit since the balloon incident. To that end, it has sought to paint the U.S. as the eager party.

In particular, a tersely worded official account of a Wednesday phone call between China’s Qin and Blinken, which took place right before both sides announced Blinken’s trip to Beijing, said that Qin urged the U.S. to respect “China’s core concerns,” such as its sovereignty claims to Taiwan, “stop interfering in China’s internal affairs, and stop harming China’s sovereignty, security and development interests in the name of competition.”

Ryan Hass, a former national-security adviser on China and Asia under the Obama administration, said he expects the Chinese media to continue to be “uncharitable” to Blinken before and after his visit.

“It’s going to be a test for Secretary Blinken and his team to tune out the noise and focus on the message that the Chinese are conveying behind closed doors,” Hass said.

—Nancy A. Youssef contributed to this article.

Write to Lingling Wei at [email protected] and William Mauldin at [email protected]