2023-06-17 19:00:18
Antony Blinken, the American Secretary of State, is expected on Sunday June 18 in Beijing. In itself, this visit constitutes an event. In November 2022, Presidents Joe Biden and Xi Jinping, who were meeting on the sidelines of the G20 organized in Bali (Indonesia), had announced that they wanted to communicate more to prevent the relationship between their two countries from continuing to deteriorate. Nevertheless, the discovery at the end of January, above the United States,a chinese spy balloon and its destruction had caused, at the last moment, the cancellation of the visit that Mr. Blinken was to make to Beijing in early February.
In March, Antony Blinken had met in Munich, on the sidelines of the security conference, State Councilor Wang Yi. The latter then met in Vienna with the national security adviser, Jake Sullivan. At the end of May, the American Secretary of Commerce, Gina Raimondo, welcomed her Chinese counterpart, Wang Wentao, to Washington, but these contacts had little response and clearly did not lead to real progress.
Tension accrue
Sign of the tensions between the two countries: the new Chinese Minister of Defense, Li Shangfu, has even explicitly refused to meet his American counterpart, Lloyd Austin, on the sidelines of the Shangri-La Dialogue, a major international conference on security which will take place is held in Singapore in early June. During this conference, a Chinese military ship even cut off the way to a US destroyer in international waters of the Taiwan Straitfurther heightening the tension between Beijing and Washington.
While Xi Jinping received Bill Gates in Beijing on Friday June 16, we do not know if he will receive Antony Blinken. “You are the first American friend I meet in Beijing this year,” reportedly told the Chinese president to the founder of Microsoft, according to the official Chinese press. “We have always placed our hopes in the American people and hoped that the friendship will continue between the peoples of the two countries,” would have specified Xi Jinping. Generally, the Chinese insist on “friendship between peoples” to circumvent governments with whom they have significant disagreements.
Thursday, June 15, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced a donation of 50 million dollars (45 million euros) to Chinese institutions – including Tsinghua University in Beijing, from which Xi Jinping graduated – to support them in their tuberculosis and malaria research. Even if they have not met the Chinese number one, other big American bosses have been received with great fanfare in China in recent weeks: Elon Musk (Tesla, Twitter…), Tim Cook (Apple), James Dimon ( JPMorgan Chase), Cristiano Amon (Qualcomm). A way for the Chinese authorities to indicate that foreign investment is always welcome in China, but also to drive a wedge between the American business community, favorable to cooperation with Beijing, and the political world, much more reserved. . For the Chinese press, there are the “good” Americans, the businessmen hostile to the decoupling of the economies, and the “bad” ones, in the pay of the “military-industrial complex”.
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