Blinken's visit to China is mixed, China has started "panda diplomacy" to show its sincerity, Wang Yi has set the tone, and China-US relations are facing a turning point.
On the evening of April 26, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken returned to the United States by special plane after a three-day trip to China. Before leaving, the US set three goals: first, to make progress on key issues, second, to convey to China its concerns on bilateral, regional and global issues, and third, to responsibly manage competition and avoid miscalculations and conflicts between China and the United States. As a result, Blinken met with Foreign Minister Wang Yi and China's senior officials as he wished, and conveyed the US position on regional issues and China-US competition, and achieved certain diplomatic achievements. The day after Blinken left Beijing, China restarted "panda diplomacy" and announced that it would send a pair of giant pandas to the United States for 10 years of exchanges and cooperation. From another perspective, the so-called "China's aid to Russia" and "overcapacity" issues of the US side have been strongly countered by China, and Blinken has made no progress on key issues.
The root cause of Blinken's trip to China is the US side's erroneous perception of China and global strategy. For a long time, the US has pursued an "offshore balancing" strategy, set up China and Russia as "imaginary enemies", and constantly projected influence in Asia and Europe under the pretext of geopolitical conflicts, ideological contradictions, and economic and trade issues, so as to unite its "democratic front" to form a "geopolitical encirclement" against China and Russia, and deliberately undermine China's territorial sovereignty and development rights, resulting in frequent coldness in bilateral relations. Just before Blinken's visit to China, the United States, Japan and the Philippines held a summit in an attempt to overturn the situation in the South China Sea, and the United States was also preparing to impose three times tariffs on Chinese steel and aluminum products, and threatened to sanction Chinese banks and financial institutions.
At a time when regional hotspot issues are detonating one after another and global economic growth is slowing down, what path China and the United States should take or how they should get along with each other is of great significance to both countries and even the rest of the world. Wang Yi recently set the tone for China-US relations in three sentences, saying that China's attitude towards improving China-US relations is sincere, and China-US relations cannot go back to the past, but they should be able to have a good future. It should be emphasized that China is not afraid of threats and challenges, and the starting point for improving China-US relations is not the so-called "compromise", but from the perspective of a community with a shared future for mankind, it is responsible to the whole world, which shows that it is a responsible major country.
The United States should take China's goodwill seriously, as the cooperation between China and Russia is deepening day by day, with the recent meeting between Chinese and Russian defense ministers in Kazakhstan and the visit of Russian President Vladimir Putin to China in May. With the reconciliation between Saudi Arabia and Iran and the Beijing peace talks between Hamas and Fatah, at a time when the Russia-Ukraine conflict and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict are pulling each other apart, if the US side does not recognize the situation clearly and continues to handle China-US relations with power politics, it cannot rule out the possibility of China making a stronger geopolitical counterattack.
China's sincerity has been given, and how to choose is a matter for the US side, and what China values is not the old-fashioned commitment of "four noes and one no", but substantive changes, and if the US side continues to act perversely, then it can only bear the consequences.