US-China diplomatic sparks fly in Alaska

By Andrew Hammond

The most important meeting in international relations so far this year took place Thursday and Friday with the diplomatic mood as frosty as the freezing Alaska weather.

Expectations around the U.S.-China session were played down, yet the diplomatic sparks at the session, between U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken plus National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and counterparts Wang Yi and Yang Jiechi, will help shape the tone of the world's most critical bilateral relationship for the next four years.

This is because, while economic and security fundamentals will largely determine the course of ties in coming years, personal chemistry between the Washington and Beijing teams ― or the absence of this ― could also be key.

The importance of this personal factor was shown during the Trump era when the former president's erratic nature accentuated the natural volatility in ties. During the Obama years, by contrast, the fact that relations remained generally cordial reflected, in significant part, the commitment of Barack Obama and Xi Jinping to bilateral stability.

Obama pursued a strategy that promoted cooperation on softer issues like climate change, while seeking constructive engagement on vexed, harder issues such as South China Sea tensions.

Moreover, Xi outlined a desire to fundamentally redevelop a new type of great power relationship with the United States to try to avoid the conflictual great power patterns of the past.

Biden was a key part of the Obama team, however, and he knows that the dynamics of the bilateral relationship have changed significantly since then. This is not just because of extra uncertainty injected into bilateral ties by Trump.

Many of China's policies that the United States finds troubling, including in Hong Kong, heightened rhetoric against Taiwan and actions in the South China Sea, were a lower-level feature of the Obama era too. And the Obama team's constructive engagement approach with China did not produce many of the desired results in terms of shaping Beijing's behavior.

Both sides put these issues "on the table" in Alaska, and although Blinken said that the session is "not a strategic dialogue," Washington and Beijing will ultimately prefer to work toward a framework to underpin a renewed basis for bilateral relations into the 2020s if this is possible. They know that this could have a broader, positive effect for international relations, and potentially forestall significant further bilateral tensions that may be otherwise "baked in."

The in-built hazards in the U.S.-China bilateral landscape that could cause tensions in coming years include new U.S. legislation such as the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act.

This legislation, which has infuriated Beijing as an "intervention" in its internal affairs, will require an annual check on whether Hong Kong has sufficient political autonomy from Beijing to qualify for continued special U.S. trading consideration that enhances its status as a world financial center, creating a yearly mechanism around which tension could coalesce.

With the two sides far apart on many key issues, the Alaska session was a chance to size each other up and gauge intent. This is true just as much for the Chinese officials as for Blinken and Sullivan, as Beijing tries to get a better sense of what Biden's election means for bilateral relations.

For all of the new U.S. president's indications that he might reverse some of Trump's overt hostility to China, Biden has yet to backtrack on any of his predecessor's policies. Indeed, he has reaffirmed several of them, including maintaining sanctions in response to human rights abuses in western Xinjiang and Hong Kong and rejecting nearly all of China's maritime claims in the South China Sea.

Amid all the disagreements that exist, what remains unclear is the degree to which the Biden team might seek to work with Beijing in areas where there are clearly defined common interests like climate change.

Tackling global warming is a key political priority of both nations and there may be a window of opportunity before the U.K.-hosted U.N. climate summit in November for a U.S.-China initiative in this area.

It is sometimes forgotten that a key precursor for the Paris deal in 2015 was a U.S.-China agreement. So, with climate-skeptic Donald Trump out of the White House, this could become a rejuvenated topic of conversation for Beijing and Washington.

Another possible area of collaboration, building on the so-called "stage 1" bilateral trade deal negotiated in 2018 and 2019, is the possibility of further economic agreements between the two. The scope for this is underlined by the fact that the Trump agreement covers few of the areas that China is often accused of misdemeanors from currency manipulation to intellectual property theft.

If the two sides can find such areas of agreement, it will demonstrate that the direction of Washington's bilateral relations with Beijing need not inevitably be a force for greater global tension. Moreover, this might even provide a pathway toward a deeper strategic partnership that helps underpin bilateral relations in the post-pandemic era.

Andrew Hammond (andrewkorea@outlook.com) is an associate at LSE IDEAS at the London School of Economics.