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It could almost have been a vacation. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in Shanghai on Wednesday to be whisked to a basketball game and a dinner of steamed buns atop a balcony overlooking the city’s Ming Dynasty Yu Garden. America’s top diplomat even took khbrknews to post on Instagram from Shanghai’s neo-classical Bund, where he lauded the students and business leaders “building bridges and ties between our countries” as the neon lights of the Lujiazui business district twinkled in the background. “Face to face diplomacy matters,” Blinken said, collar gaping.
The tenor was markedly different from Blinken’s last visit to China in June, when bilateral relations between the world’s top two economies had reached a nadir. Although Blinken was granted an audience with Chinese President Xi Jinping, the two sides entrenched their positions over every contention, from the status of Taiwan and American efforts to stymie China’s technology to human-rights and Xi’s support for Russia’s war in Ukraine. It was only in November that a slight thaw emerged after U.S. President Joe Biden and Xi agreed to resume high-level military communication after a 16-month hiatus. (A video conference last week between both nations’ top defense officials was their first significant engagement since late 2022.)
Yet substantively, the relationship remains broken. The same day as Blinken touched down for his three-day China visit his boss in the White House signed two pieces of legislation specifically designed to rile his host: one banning TikTok unless Beijing-based parent ByteDance divest the…
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