Cables From The Diplomatic Frontlines - Biden and Blinken meet Wang Yi: underlying tensions and China reclaiming some leverage ahead of the November summit.

Washington meetings reveal underlying tensions.

• Summer was a relatively calm period for US-China affairs: Beijing was busy trying to solve its property crisis, high youth unemployment (which reached such a high level - passing the 20% mark - that officials in Beijing stopped publishing them) and internal PLA reorganization - ending with a removal of defense minister Li Shangfu.

• (side note: this is now the second time a high level minister has been removed in China after disappearing from the public view first. Quite why this is so is unclear: whether these are intentional theatrics that add to the aura of mystique surrounding Xi Jinping, or precautions to avoid defensive measures/coalition formations and a pushback by the removed official is (in the absence of more concrete and definitive evidence) anyone’s guess.)

• In the meantime, Washington’s perpetually limited bandwidth was focused on Ukraine and avoiding government shutdowns.

• In other words, summer was a relatively welcome respite for the long-standing tensions that reached their peak in February over a balloon saga.

• Diplomatic relations were back to normal by late spring - when Secretary of State Antony Blinken scored a diplomatic victory on his trip to Beijing: and Xi Jinping publicly pronounced that China had no intention of supplanting the US.

• (side note: naturally, this is not true - China has every bit of intention of doing exactly that. But saying the very opposite in public, is a significant signaling cost - and probably would not have happened but for the major pressure from the Biden admin).

• Things are now back to normal - towards tensions.

• The Israel-Hamas war and Iran’s continuous violations of the IAEA monitoring regime (refusing inspections of its nuclear facilities) are points of renewed friction - China is not doing its part as a UN Security Council member.

• So is the increasing aggressiveness of North Korean nuclear tests.

• With that said, this background does not change China’s desire to proceed with a potential Xi - Biden meeting in the APAC summit (in San Francisco) later this month.

• But it is also clear that China wants to enter this meeting (on the foreign turf) with a stronger hand and reclaimed leverage.

• Beijing appears to be willing to help Russia in new devious ways, cause additional trouble of ‘‘hybrid’’ nature, and respond (to Biden admin’s crippling semiconductor restrictions) with export restrictions of their own.

• We shall turn to these below, but Wang Yi’s meetings with both Blinken and Biden do already provide a taster of what is on Beijing’s mind.

• It was for example, rather notable that the readout from Wang Yi’s meeting with President Biden was so short, and contained essentially nothing but platitudes: no mention of any major ongoing issues.

• It is indeed very unusual: there is a burning hot crisis in the Middle East, and a war in Ukraine, and yet, there is no mention of it in either readout - for that matter, no other actual/specific issue was mentioned either.

• Wang Yi’s readout mentions the importance of ‘‘One China policy”, and yet Biden’s readout was mute on this issue.

• Readouts from Blinken - Yi meeting were far more interesting.

• The US Secretary of State reminded his counterpart that the issue of Xinjiang/human rights will be brought up again and again.

• There is however no mention of this issue from Yi’s readout - which focused instead on both countries’ “objective understandings of each other's strategic intentions, correctly view the competitive factors in the exchanges between China and the United States, and define the concept of national security. [emphasis added]”

• In other words, the two sides are still talking in different realms: Blinken is using the language of rules-based order and of ‘‘human rights” (granted, not out of pure idealism of course), but Yi tries to bring back the discourse to the good old days of the original Bismarck - defining the ‘‘concept’’ of national security can be interpreted as Beijing trying to establish mutually agreed spheres of influence..

• The major conceptual differences on the Israel vs Hamas war were also apparent.

• Blinken emphasized “Israel’s right to defend itself and emphasized the importance of all countries – particularly permanent members of the United Nations Security Council –unequivocally denouncing Hamas’s terrorist attacks and using their influence to prevent escalation and expansion of the conflict”.

• Whereas the Chinese foreign minister did not even mention the word “Hamas”, and framed Israel’s war against a terrorist organization as a ‘‘Palestine-Israel conflict”.

• And while Blinken’s readout mentions “Russia’s war against Ukraine”, Yi’s readout contains neither “war” nor “Russia”, describing the discussion as “an exchange of views on Ukraine”.

• (side note: someone who just woke up from a two year coma, would obviously not understand what Wang Yi means when referring to Ukraine - did they talk about Ukraine’s economy? Why would the two great powers randomly exchange views on Ukraine?)

• So then, major differences remain, and the fault lines that will remain in the Biden - Xi meeting are quite obvious.

• Wang Yi is already selling the potential meeting between the two presidents as a monumentally difficult task to pull off - saying that organizing the meeting will be far from a ‘‘smooth sailing”.

• (side note: not to be outdone, the White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre later responded with her own version of the same - warning that the now confirmed Biden - Xi meeting will involve a “tough conversation” about the state of the US - China competition).

• But China’s attempts to go into this meeting with higher levels of prestige, standing, and leverage go beyond the mere rhetoric: we shall turn to unpack these below.