Antony Blinken and Wang Yi’s conversation didn’t cool friction over Taiwan and Russia.
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken met on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference on Saturday, weeks after Blinken’s planned trip to Beijing was canceled due to what the US says was a Chinese surveillance balloon shot down on February 4. Relations between the two nations are at the lowest point in decades, and Saturday’s meeting didn’t do much to improve the situation.
The primary focus of the conference was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the one-year anniversary of which is approaching, but Wang and Blinken’s meeting was a critical and much-watched sideshow to the main event given recent tensions over the Chinese balloon. Wang took the opportunity to paint the US response to the device, which China maintains was a civilian weather balloon that was blown off course, as “hysterical” and “absurd.”
Though European nations and the US expressed solidarity with Ukraine and a commitment to providing the country with weapons, Wang was more circumspect, saying only that China supported dialogue and an end to the war. Blinken, for his part, told CBS’s Face the Nation Sunday that he was concerned China might provide material weapons support to Russia. “We have seen [Chinese companies] provide non-lethal support to Russia for use in Ukraine,” Blinken said, though he did not specify what that support entails. “The concern that we have now is based on information we have that they’re considering providing lethal support, and we’ve made very clear to them that that would cause a serious problem for us and in our relationship.”
According to a February 13 report by the Stimson Center, a nonpartisan think tank, China has not thus far provided military support to Russia, at least as far as publicly available information shows, despite providing economic support in the form of increased trade.
But China’s “no limits” relationship with Russia and the surveillance balloon are just the latest points of tension between the two major world powers; long-standing issues over trade, US presence in the Pacific, and the opposing world views of the West and Xi Jinping have laid the groundwork for the present tension.China sees the world differently
As Vox’s Jen Kirby wrote earlier this month, the crisis over the alleged Chinese spy balloon demonstrates “just how unstable the current relationship is between these two countries.
