US and China eye stability but base hollow for next crisis

France 24 ^

[FarCenter]

...

Yun Sun, director of the China programme at the Stimson Center, said the United States shared blame for the failure to restart dialogue in the military realm, an area where a crisis is most likely to erupt.

The Biden administration -- which the rival Republican Party is eager to portray as weak on Beijing -- has refused Chinese requests to lift sanctions on its new defence minister, General Li Shangfu, which were imposed under a US law that targets arms purchases from Russia.

The administration says that sanctions should not prevent Li from meeting his counterpart Lloyd Austin.

"The State Department will say there is no legal problem for him to meet Secretary Austin. Sure, there's no problem for the Americans, but there is for the Chinese," Yun said.

...

Xi and Biden, who know each other well from their times as vice presidents, met for the first time as leaders in November in Bali, where both sides similarly said they wanted to keep tensions in check.

The Bali good vibes abruptly ended within months when the United States said it detected and later shot down a Chinese spy balloon over US soil, leading Blinken to put off an earlier plan to visit.

Xi in a speech soon afterward took rare direct aim at the United States, which he accused of pursuing "containment, encirclement and suppression" of China.

...

Yun, the Washington-based analyst, noted that the United States has kept issuing sanctions on Chinese companies and that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Pelosi's Republican successor, has voiced hope of paying his own visit to Taiwan.

"I don't expect this temporary restarting of engagement to survive that kind of trauma," she said.

"After Blinken's visit, the relationship is still extremely vulnerable."

[logi_cal869]

I guess that the hacking attacks everyone blamed publicly on the Russians worked, getting the admin to suck up to the ccp. /s

I wonder what concessions blinken made...