If confirmed, the meeting with Xi, China’s most powerful and autocratic leader in recent history, will take place on Monday afternoon and will be the culmination of more than 10 collective hours of meetings with Wang on Monday and Foreign Minister Qin Gang on Sunday.
“The real test of whether the meetings were productive, at least from the Chinese side, will be whether Secretary Blinken gets a meeting with Xi Jinping,” said Jacob Stokes, a senior fellow in the Indo-Pacific security program at the Center for a New American Security think tank in Washington.
“Withholding that possibility to the last possible minute suggests Beijing is trying to use the prospect as leverage,” he said.
It has been customary in the past for the Chinese leader to meet with visiting U.S. secretaries of state, and Xi on Friday hosted Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People on Tiananmen Square.
Blinken met Wang earlier on Monday in the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse, where the two tight-lipped officials greeted each other in a highly formal exchange before entering a large conference room for a closed-door session.
The two sides have left very little to chance during Blinken’s two-day visit, keeping core disagreements — on human rights, trade and dangerous military encounters in the South China Sea and Taiwan Strait — away from the cameras.
Blinken’s agenda on Monday included meetings with U.S. business leaders in the health-care, automotive and entertainment sectors about the business climate in China. He is also meeting with students and alumni of exchange programs, which have reduced sharply since the recent downturn in ties between the United States and China.
After Sunday’s discussions with Qin, Blinken’s aides touted modest progress in securing follow-on meetings in Washington with the Chinese foreign minister and agreeing to hold “working-level” meetings to address specific challenges in the weeks ahead.
The talks were “candid, substantive and constructive” said State Department spokesman Matt Miller. This framing was similar to the Chinese version of events.
“The two sides had candid, in-depth and constructive talks at length on the overall bilateral ties and important issues,” the Chinese Foreign Ministry said in its readout.
The change in tone between the two governments and their respective mouthpieces has been striking.
Chinese state media, after having castigated Blinken as a meddling provocateur, cast the visit in a favorable light.
Sunday’s talks had brought “positive expectations to the international community,” said an editorial in the Global Times, a nationalist tabloid affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party.
Relations between Washington and Beijing had been at their worst since the establishment of diplomatic ties, multiple outlets pointed out, but that provided an opportunity for improvement, they said.
“The whole world is watching to find clues about whether the relationship between the two countries can thaw,” said the Global Times.
Even Hua Chunying, the Foreign Ministry’s chief spokeswoman who is usually the queen of anti-American zingers, was putting a positive spin on the visit after Sunday’s talks, tweeting a list of all the things the two sides had agreed upon so far.
Both sides agreed to continue advancing consultations through the joint working group to address specific issues in the relations. pic.twitter.com/BSzPaAgDyW
— Hua Chunying 华春莹 (@SpokespersonCHN) June 18, 2023
Qin added that the two nations discussed increasing passenger flights between China and the United States, and encouraging the exchange of more students, scholars and businesspeople. U.S. officials have also worked on increasing journalist visas for media seeking to cover the two countries.
U.S. officials spoke far more favorably about Sunday’s discussions than they did during meetings with Chinese counterparts on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference in February.
During those meetings, Washington angered Beijing after airing U.S. concerns about China considering providing lethal aid to Russia. Relations dipped further when the United States shot down a high-altitude surveillance balloon that crossed into U.S. airspace and canceled Blinken’s originally scheduled trip.
But a senior State Department official said the United States and China made “progress” on Washington’s three key objectives during this trip to Beijing: reestablishing senior-level communications, airing concerns and exploring areas for cooperation.
The talks are likely to pave the way for follow-on visits to China by Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen — a visit sought by Beijing, which is hoping to boost investment amid an economic downturn — and potentially Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and climate envoy John F. Kerry.
President Biden on Saturday said he hoped to meet Xi in coming months to discuss the issues that divide the two.
Xi might attend the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meeting in November in San Francisco, where he could meet with Biden. Their last meeting last November on the sidelines of the Group of 20 Summit in Bali, Indonesia, helped ease tensions.
Amid the efforts to show progress in Beijing, however, U.S. officials declined to confirm any movement on reopening of military-to-military communications, a key priority going into the meetings given the multiple dangerous close calls in recent months. These include a near-collision of warships near Taiwan and an aggressive fighter jet flyby over the South China Sea.
Beijing sees the resumption of such channels as potentially legitimizing U.S. military activity targeting China.
Before Blinken’s arrival, Beijing rebuked the United States, accusing Washington of engaging in “irresponsible bullying” and living under the “illusion” that it could deal with China from a “position of strength.”
Qin warned Blinken during a call last week that he should “show respect” and made clear his view that Washington alone was responsible for the abysmal state of relations.
Chinese officials emphasized that key sticking points remain unresolved, like U.S. military assistance to Taiwan, which it considers a violation of its sovereignty, and U.S. export controls on technology, measures it considers a sign of trying to keep China weak.
But they also underscored a desire to turn a new page, saying the current state of relations “does not serve the fundamental interests of the two peoples or meet the shared expectations of the international community,” according to the Foreign Ministry.
Tobin reported from Taipei, Taiwan.