Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is traveling to Beijing to meet with senior Chinese officials in an attempt to help stabilize the fraught relationship between the world's two largest economies.
“China and the United States will hold top-level official meetings during U.S. Secretary of Treasury Janet Yellen’s visit to Beijing later this week. Neither side expects a significant improvement in relations in the short run but there’s reason for hope that they may gradually accept each other’s differences.
Chinese commentators said Washington has unilaterally started a Cold War against China and thus it is unlikely that the U.S. will stop imposing new curbs on China’s high-technology sector in the short run.
Zhang Weiwei, a professor of international relations at Fudan University, said on a TV program on June 26th that the Sino-U.S. conflict was caused by the U.S., which refused to accept the fact that China is rising. Besides, he said, it was a big mistake that the U.S. thought it could stop China from rising.
However, he said, the situation seems to be improving.
Citing the Elizabeth Kuebler-Ross stages of grieving in psychology, Zhang said, after failing to defeat China in the trade and technology wars, the U.S. seems to have passed the first two stages – denial and anger – and is moving on to the third stage, which refers to ‘partial acceptance and bargaining’. The fourth and fifth stages are known as ‘depression’ and ‘acceptance’.
He added that China has so far not resumed military talks with the U.S. as it wants to warn the latter that it is not afraid of any military conflicts.
In Beijing, the US Treasury Department said in a statement issued Sunday U.S. time, Yellen will discuss with People’s Republic of China officials ‘the importance for our countries – as the world’s two largest economies – to responsibly manage our relationship, communicate directly about areas of concern, and work together to address global challenges’.
Citing a speech Yellen gave in April, the Treasury Department said the U.S. will seek to secure its national security interests along with those of our allies and to protect human rights through targeted actions that are not intended to gain economic advantage.
‘We seek a healthy economic relationship with China that fosters mutually beneficial growth and innovation and expands economic opportunity for American workers and businesses’, it said. ‘We also seek to cooperate on urgent global challenges like climate change and debt distress’.
There’s a distance to go before much if any of that can happen. When Blinken met Xi in Beijing on June 19th, he was given a seat opposite that of Chinese diplomat Wang Yi while Xi was sitting in the middle. Chinese pundits said the sitting plan was aimed at showing the world that China was teaching the U.S. a lesson.
‘The purpose of Yellen’s visit to China may not have considered China’s concerns’, Liu Yong, a Hubei-based military columnist, writes in an article published on Monday. ‘Yellen said she wants to re-establish relations with China. But she is actually saying that the U.S. wants China to compromise and continue to serve American interests’.
At the end of last year, China held $867.1 billion of U.S. Treasury bonds, down from $1.12 trillion at the end of 2018. Japan’s holding of U.S. Treasury bonds grew from $1.04 trillion to $1.08 trillion for the same period while the United Kingdom’s rose from $288 billion to $654.5 billion.
Since U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin met with Chinese Defense Minister Wei Feng in Cambodia last November, the two sides have not held official talks again due to growing U.S.-China political tensions. On June 2nd, Austin shook hands with new Chinese Defense Minister Li Shangfu in the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore but they did not have an official meeting.
Liu Pengyu, the spokesman for China’s Embassy in Washington, said in a briefing on June 28th that the U.S. must lift sanctions against China if it wants to resume high-level military talks.
On the same day, Blinken said he had told his Chinese counterparts during his Beijing trip that the U.S. will ensure that no American technology is used by China to make hypersonic weapons or abuse human rights.
‘In recent years, the U.S. has continuously generalized the concept of national security, abused export control measures and sacrificed the interests of its allies to coerce and win over other countries to suppress and contain China’s semiconductor industry in order to maintain its global hegemony’, an unnamed spokesperson of China’s Ministry of Commerce said.
While Chinese commentators remain confident that China will beat the US in the end, the U.S. will soon strengthen its sanctions against China”. -Jeff Pao, Asia Times
Recent developments suggest that much of the world is beginning to see China as its major trading partner of the future rather than the United States.
And, seeing how the U.S. and its fellow NATO members are all frozen out of BRICS, the SCO, the NDB, the AAIB, Yellen, along with the rest of Washington, D.C., have had to come to terms with the fact that Beijing is a rising power while the U.S. appears to be headed down a path of economic collapse.