U.S. and China See Fragile Opportunity to Repair Ties

A first barometer of the chance for success is a dinner planned for Thursday in Washington, where Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo will sit down with her Chinese counterpart, Wang Wentao. It will be the first cabinet-level meeting in Washington between the two countries during the Biden administration.

Another test will be whether the top defense officials from both countries hold talks on the sidelines of an annual security forum in Singapore early next month, as has happened in the past. China wants the U.S. to lift sanctions placed years ago on China’s recently appointed defense minister as a precondition for the meeting. President Biden said last weekend that the demand is under discussion, though State Department and other officials later said it isn’t so.

The planned bilateral meetings would represent a “thaw" in contacts as described by Biden—set in motion by an unexpected burst of diplomacy after months of at-times bitter sparring on the global stage.

The push to restore contacts is being driven by a shared desire for stability in the relationship from both Beijing and Washington—but for different reasons.

The Biden administration has pressed to steady matters with Beijing in the midst of friction over Taiwan, the war in Ukraine and other issues. Its motivation is partly to prevent tensions from spiraling into conflict, but also to show allies and others that it can manage a working relationship with Beijing, according to current and former U.S. officials.

While Beijing has largely given Washington a cold shoulder in recent months, it now has its own reasons for detente. Chinese officials point to a priority for Beijing: paving the way for Chinese 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 Biden. However, Chinese and U.S. officials said, time is running out to lay the necessary groundwork for such a meeting.

“This moment is an opportunity but a fragile one," said Evan Medeiros, a former senior national-security official in the Obama administration and now a professor at Georgetown University. “Beijing and Washington are going to try to rebuild the basic channels of communication, even as competition intensifies."

Going into this year, both governments were looking to kick-start dialogue over geopolitics, the economy, trade and other issues that had dwindled following bitter disputes over Taiwan and technology controls. Then, a suspected Chinese spy balloon crossed North America before the U.S. shot it down in February, sending relations back into an acrimonious spiral.

The balloon incident led Secretary of State Antony 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 continued to grow, and China repeatedly rebuffed U.S. requests for high-level talks. But behind the scenes, backchannel diplomacy hasn’t stopped.

In March, Beijing sent to Washington a delegation led by its retired ambassador to the U.S., Cui Tiankai. There, Cui, who was China’s longest-serving envoy to Washington, met with national security adviser Jake Sullivan and Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman and talked about Beijing’s interest in brokering peace in Ukraine, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

U.S. and other Western officials have cast doubt on Beijing’s ability and willingness to be a genuine peacemaker given its alignment with Moscow. Meeting with Sullivan and Sherman, Cui expressed China’s frustration that no matter what it does or says, the U.S. will take actions against it, the people with knowledge of the matter said.

Still, a takeaway for the Chinese delegation from the trip, according to the people, was that Washington wanted some in-depth communication between the two sides. An initial sign of thawing relations: On May 10-11, Sullivan and Wang Yi, China’s top foreign-affairs official, met in Vienna and discussed ways to restore high-level exchanges in the months ahead.

Beijing’s recent tentative return to diplomacy with Washington came about, in part, because the Chinese leadership sees itself in a stronger position than immediately after the balloon incident, a U.S. official said. Xi has hosted several European leaders in an attempt to divide the Western alliance and obtained a vow of strong trade ties and defiance of U.S. sanctions from Brazil’s president. “They think we don’t look great," said the U.S. official.

China’s Foreign Ministry said in a faxed response to questions, “China and the U.S. are maintaining necessary communications."

Meanwhile, any fledgling detente is likely to be fragile.

“There’s so little structural trust and so much animosity in the relationship that we’re just one news-cycle event away from knocking recent progress off-kilter, as we saw with the Chinese spy balloon incident," said Jude Blanchette, a China specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Among potential land mines: Chinese officials are anxious about an analysis by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other agencies of the electronic and other equipment carried by the balloon. They are also concerned about an expected Biden executive order banning U.S. investment in China’s semiconductor and other critical technology sectors.

Should the balloon analysis become public or the executive order materialize, the Chinese government is likely to retaliate, potentially disrupting the rapprochement, Chinese officials said.

“China wants the U.S. side to show sincerity," said Yun Sun, director of the China program at the Stimson Center, a Washington think tank. “It doesn’t want to have those talks, only to face more U.S. sanctions later."

If the White House doesn’t budge, Beijing will have to decide whether to stand by its demand for the U.S. to lift the sanctions on Gen. Li Shangfu. The Trump administration imposed the sanctions in 2018 because Li, then head of the Chinese military’s Equipment Development Department, approved the purchase of Russian jet fighters and missiles. He became defense minister this year.

If Li and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin don’t meet in Singapore, some U.S. officials are concerned about how that would be received by Southeast Asian allies and others nervous about being caught between the U.S. and China.

Plans for Commerce Minister Wang’s U.S. trip appeared shaky over the weekend after Biden and the leaders of the six other Group of Seven democracies issued a statement pledging to take steps against what they see as Beijing’s tactics of intimidation.

In a widely circulated post, a Chinese social-media account focused on foreign affairs hinted that Wang could cancel his meeting with Raimondo.

Then, on Sunday, Beijing banned Micron Technology from selling to major Chinese customers owing to national-security concerns. The move, showing China’s willingness to be tough with U.S. companies, makes it easier for Wang to travel to Washington without drawing criticism at home, according to foreign-policy analysts.

On Tuesday, new Chinese Ambassador Xie Feng arrived in the U.S., months after his appointment was reported.

Beijing wants Wang to send an open-for-business message to his American counterpart even as Xi has directed his security apparatus to keep up pressure on U.S. consulting and other firms that multinational companies rely on to assess risks in China. A trade and investment summit is being held in the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse on Wednesday evening in Beijing, according to an agenda seen by The Wall Street Journal, before Wang is scheduled to meet Raimondo.

Raimondo met in Washington with a delegation from the American Chamber of Commerce in China earlier this month. According to people familiar with the matter, the secretary listened to the concerns U.S. business representatives had over recent Chinese actions against American companies including raids, detentions and investigations.

Raimondo indicated that she would state to her Chinese counterpart that the intention of the administration’s policy is essentially to reduce risk as opposed to decoupling from China, the people said. Raimondo told the group that she is interested in moving the economic relationship forward on mutually accepted terms and that she is looking forward to traveling to China later this year.