US Secretary of State Tony Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan are going to the two-day meeting with Chinese colleagues Wang Yi and Yang Jiechi in Anchorage, Alaska, carrying a lot of luggage.
For now, other political disputes are more likely to dominate the talks in Anchorage, according to William Reinsch, a trade expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who served for 15 years as president of the National Council on Foreign Trade.
The two countries have recently clashed over a range of issues, including the crackdown from Beijing to Hong Kong, a former British territory, and allegations of widespread human rights abuses in China’s western Xinjiang region.
China expects the Alaska meeting to deviate from trade policy and eventually lead to a reversal of U.S. tariffs, as well as its commitments to buy more U.S. products. America is not ready to make concessions.
“I don’t think it has fallen into the limited flexibility that the president has in light of the strong shift in US public opinion against China and the strong demands of Congress from both parties for a hard line on China,” Reinsch told CNN Business. “Therefore, trade and technology remain issues, but the other issues, particularly human rights, are now at the top of the list.”
Neither side has indicated that they see Anchorage as a place for significant changes in their relationship. The Biden government emphasized that the summit is “a one-time meeting” that “is meant to be an initial discussion”. And Beijing said it did not have “high expectations” for the event.
“Lowering hopes for the meeting reflects domestic policy – on the US side, Biden wants to avoid looking too lenient with Beijing – but also the broader state of the relationship,” analysts at the Eurasia Group wrote in a research note last week. “Neither the US nor China is willing to make concessions that the other believes are necessary to significantly relax tensions.”
Human rights issues, meanwhile, may actually exacerbate some of the major economic pain points in the future.
“The Biden government will link human rights issues to exports [and] technology sales, “said Alex Capri, a researcher at the Hinrich Foundation and a senior visitor at the National University of Singapore.” Expect to see more export controls and sanctions against Chinese interests. “
“Biden’s ‘Build Back Better’ platform is actually a more coherent version of [Make America Great Again], when it comes to strategic reshoring and ring-fencing sectors, “Capri told CNN Business, pointing to potential efforts to remove China from the supply chains of pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, batteries, rare earths and artificial intelligence as” just the beginning “.
Correction: An earlier version of this story mistakenly disclosed Xinjiang’s location in China.