Blinken to meet China’s Xi Jinping in final day of high-stakes Beijing visit

Beijing
CNN
 — 

Chinese leader Xi Jinping and top American diplomat Antony Blinken met in Beijing on Monday, in a potentially crucial step toward patching US-China ties after they cratered in the wake of a dispute over a Chinese surveillance balloon earlier this year.

Blinken is the first US Secretary of State to visit Beijing in five years and his talks with senior Chinese officials are seen as a key litmus test for whether some sort of detente can be forged at a time of lingering distrust.

Uncertainty around whether Xi and Blinken would meet during the two-day visit further highlighted the fraught US-China relations and a failure to schedule a face to face would have been seen by Washington as a slight, breaking with a number of previous visits from top American diplomats.

The meeting, which took place at Beijing’s cavernous Great Hall of the People, was only publicly announced by the US about an hour before it went ahead. It lasted roughly half an hour, beginning at 4:34 p.m. local time and ended at 5:09 p.m., a State Department official said.

“The world needs an overall stable Sino-US relationship, and whether China and the United States can get along has a bearing on the future and destiny of mankind,” Xi told Blinken according to a Chinese readout of the meeting.

“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,” Xi added.

The two global powers have been increasingly at loggerheads over a host of issues ranging from Beijing’s close ties with Moscow to American efforts to limit the sale of advanced technologies to China.

Key among those concerns has been repairing fractured lines of communication, which have broken down over the past year, especially when it comes to high-level military exchanges – raising concerns in Washington that a mistake or accident could quickly spin into conflict.

Earlier this year a Chinese surveillance balloon – detected floating across the US and hovering over sensitive military sites before ultimately being shot down by an American fighter plane – sent relations plunging to a new low and resulted in Blinken scrapping an earlier Beijing visit.

This time, the diplomatic mission went forward.

A roughly three-hour meeting between Blinken and China’s top foreign affairs adviser Wang Yi earlier Monday underscored the deep challenges in overcoming the mistrust and friction that has come to characterize the relationship.

The Chinese government’s growing clout internationally and increasingly authoritarian controls at home have pushed the US to reframe how it manages its relations with the power in recent years.

Repeating Beijing’s typical rhetoric, Wang blamed Washington’s “wrong perception” of China as the “root cause” of the decline in the two sides’ relations and demanded the US stop “suppressing” China’s technological development and hyping the “China threat,” according to a readout from Chinese state broadcaster CCTV.

“We must reverse the downward spiral of China-US relations, promote a return to a healthy and stable track, and jointly find the right way for China and the United States to co-exist in the new era,” Wang said, adding that Blinken’s visit came at “a critical juncture in US-China relations, where a choice needs to be made between dialogue or confrontation, cooperation or conflict.”

Wang also reiterated that Taiwan is one of one of China’s “core interests,” over which it “has no room for compromise or backdown.”

The self-ruling democratic island, which China’s ruling Communist Party claims but has…