https://www.frontpagemag.com/secretary-of-state-blinkens-peculiar-visit-to-china/
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken traveled to China this past weekend for meetings with senior Chinese officials, months after canceling his trip there in the wake of the Chinese spy balloon encroachment of U.S. airspace. He met with Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang for hours, followed by a meeting with China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi. It was uncertain whether China’s President Xi Jinping would agree to give an audience to Secretary Blinken until, with about 45 minutes notice, Xi and Blinken ended up meeting for about a half hour.
Secretary Blinken conveyed the same message in person to China’s leadership that the Biden administration has been uttering for months. Keep the channels of communication open “to ensure competition does not veer into conflict,” Blinken told Wang Yi.
China’s message during Secretary Blinken’s visit was also the same as its leaders have uttered many times before. According to China’s view of why tensions between China and the United States have risen so sharply, the U.S. has failed to show due respect for China’s vital national interests, particularly regarding China’s territorial claim to Taiwan. “State-to-state interactions should always be based on mutual respect and sincerity,” President Xi remarked.
A few days before Secretary Blinken’s visit, China’s Foreign Minister Qin Gang spoke more bluntly during his phone call with Secretary Blinken. He demanded that the United States “show respect” for China’s core concerns and “stop undermining China’s sovereignty, security and development interests in the name of competition.” That is a bit rich coming from the country which sent a spy balloon over U.S. sovereign airspace earlier this year to surveil sensitive U.S. military sites, and which set up a secret Chinese police station on U.S. soil.
There was not a single reported acknowledgement of responsibility by China’s leaders, much less an apology, for China’s invasions of U.S. sovereignty and security. Then again, they see no reason to do so with President Biden in the White House. President Biden showed how weak and out of touch with reality he is when he said, shortly before Secretary Blinken’s arrival in China, that the spy balloon incursion was more “embarrassing” for China’s leadership “than it was intentional.”
Secretary Blinken’s face-to-face meetings with China’s leaders were not only a waste of time. As Republican Representative Elise Stefanik of New York warned, Secretary Blinken’s trip would only serve to “legitimize” the Chinese Communist Party’s “continued subversion of our sovereignty.”
The Biden administration would rather patch things up with China as an end in itself than confront the Chinese regime’s increasingly provocative actions. Recently, for example, one of China’s warships came within 150 yards of an American destroyer conducting a freedom-of-navigation exercise with Canada in international waters. And one of China’s jet fighters flew directly in front of an American surveillance plane flying in international airspace. The Biden administration’s response was a feckless call to “keep the lines open with the Chinese to make it clear how unacceptable those particular intercepts are.”
