US national security adviser Jake Sullivan on Monday met top Chinese official and Politburo member Yang Jiechi for “candid, in-depth, substantive and productive” talks in Luxembourg, continuing their high-level engagement which has intensified since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The conversation lasted for four-and-a-half hours and in a press briefing, White House press secretary Karin Jean-Pierre said that the “candid, substantive and productive” conversation covered “a number of regional and global security issues, as well as key issues in US-China relations”.
When asked if this would lead to a meeting between US President Joe Biden and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jingping, the press secretary said, “Interactions are planned at a range of officials across the US government, but nothing to announce on a POTUS-Xi meeting at this time. They last talked on the phone on March 18th. We will continue to maintain open lines of communication with China.”
Sullivan, one of Biden’s closest aides, and Yang Jiechi, who is also the director of the office of the foreign affairs commission in China, have emerged as the two central figures in continued high-level engagement between the two countries. They met in Rome in March for a seven-hour long meeting, following which Biden and Xi held a phone call. Sullivan and Yang then spoke on the phone again on May 18.
A White House readout of Monday’s meeting, said, “Mr. Sullivan underscored the importance of maintaining open lines of communication to manage competition between our two countries.”
The intensified US-China engagement comes in the backdrop of a set of external and domestic events in America.
On the global platform, the US has sent a clear and public message to China not to actively support Russia and warned it against circumventing sanctions. US officials have said, in recent weeks, that while they continue to keep a close watch on Beijing, they have not received any indication so far that China is actively seeking to subvert sanctions. Experts believe that Beijing, which is far more closely integrated with the global economy than Russia, is wary of facing any secondary sanctions.
At the same time, within the US, which is facing record inflation, a powerful policy constituency is advocating the lifting of a series of tariffs imposed on China during the administration of former president Donald Trump. Treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, told the US Congress last week that the administration was looking to “reconfigure” tariffs to make them “more strategic”.
“Tariff reductions could help to bring down the prices of things that people buy that are burdensome,” she said.
But, while Yellen and commerce secretary Gina Raimondo – who has said it may “make sense” to reduce tariffs to battle inflation – appear to be in favour of revising Washington’s tough economic approach to China, US trade representative, Katherine Tai, has spoken of the leverage that tariffs provide at the negotiating table.
These developments also come just weeks after US secretary of state Antony Blinken laid out the administration’s China strategy that categorised China as the only country which both wished to reshape the international order and increasingly had the economic, military, diplomatic and technological power to do so.
The current US strategy is framed around the principles of “invest, align and compete”: invest in boosting US capabilities and strength, align with a set of allies and partners, and compete with China. But the strategy also has kept open the doors for cooperation with China on issues such as climate, health security, non proliferation and arms control, countering narcotics, food security, and global macroeconomic coordination.
Administration officials claim it is this mixed strategy — competing while also keeping channels of communication open to find common ground — that appears to be guiding the frequent Sullivan-Yang exchanges.
