Yesterday afternoon a breaking news message popped up from my South China Morning Post feeder, saying that Washington is sending a senior diplomat to China next week in a visit seen as an essential first step towards a potential leadership summit between the two powers. The news came amid another report this morning that seemed to be in contradiction of it, namely that the economic dialogue will not be resumed from the Trump-era breakdown.
Well, what to make of it…? I guess one is left trying to see through the rubble as usual. A presidential summit would probably become the foundation of everything else that is to come regarding a renewed form of engagement. In any case, the rumour mill has been active on a Biden-Xi personal meeting ever since the US president met with Vladimir Putin in Geneva. Nothing much has come of that, mind you, except for more distrust.
The choice of emissary has reportedly fallen to Wendy Sherman, deputy secretary of state and another hawkish member of Joe Biden’s cabinet. She is scheduled to meet China’s foreign vice-minister Xie Fang in Tianjin, in a first face-to-face encounter since March when senior diplomats Yang Jiechi, Wang Yi, Antony Blinken, and Jake Sullivan traded verbal blows in Alaska, to discuss the possibility of an initial gathering between her boss, Blinken, and foreign minister Wang Yi.
It is a get-together that is seen as a precondition on the long road to the eventual presidential encounter as well as a testament that Alaska constituted a crash in relations that will have to be rebuilt almost from scratch. Why else wouldn’t it be possible for Blinken to go to Beijing directly, meet with counterpart Wang, and hammer out a pathway for the summit? We cannot know which side insisted on what, but clearly, there is a need to scan and rescan before anything happens.
One has to wonder, though, whether Sherman is the right choice for that part of the mission. No doubt is she an accomplished diplomat, but her most recent tour through South East Asia has raised more questions than answers about America’s regional commitment, at least with some. I am reminded of her encounter with Hun Sen, Cambodia’s prime minister, whom she more or less pontificated to how to run his country. Provoking meetings with opposition leaders have certainly left an aftertaste too.
Interesting also is the location of the meeting. Tianjin is a major port city in the north-east of China, not far from Beijing. But it isn’t Beijing. Maybe it symbolises how far we are from an agreement and a summit. At least Sherman is going there with a specific brief, and she won’t dare to deviate from it when speaking to Xie, let alone lecture a senior politician of Beijing’s echelon on Xinjiang, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. She will certainly not try to incite resistance in the streets against the government.
Maybe Washington could have done a bit better if it was serious about putting the relationship on a more constructive footing again. An offer to dispatch a US representative more senior and respected by Beijing might have thawed the ice faster. But as I said, we cannot know whose idea it was to have the Sherman-Xie meeting as a precursor to a Blinken-Wang encounter, or why it was even deemed necessary over a direct approach between the two foreign ministers.
A friend of mine jokingly suggested Kamala Harris, but she hasn’t been to Europe yet…
