Talks between the US and China could fuel trade tensions

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US Secretary of State Tony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan carry a lot of baggage to the two-day meeting with Chinese counterparts Wang Yi and Yang Jiechi in Anchorage, Alaska.

Former President Donald Trump spent much of his tenure with escalating tensions between the world’s two largest economies. He unleashed a bitter trade war that the two sides have yet to fully unravel. And he punished some of China’s leading tech companies with crippling sanctions, largely out of concern that they pose a threat to US national security.

For now, other political disputes are more likely to dominate the Anchorage talk, according to William Reinsch, a trade expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who chaired the National Foreign Trade Council for 15 years.

The two countries have recently clashed over a number of issues, including Beijing’s crackdown on Hong Kong, a former British territory, and allegations of widespread human rights violations in the West China region of Xinjiang.

China hopes the Alaska meeting will decouple politics from trade and ultimately lead to a rollback in US tariffs and its pledge to buy more US goods. America is unwilling to make concessions.

“I don’t think it has sunk in the limited flexibility the President has in light of the sharp shift in US public opinion against China and the strong demands in Congress from both parties for a hardline against China”, Reinsch told CNN Business. “So trade and technology remain issues, but the other issues, especially human rights, are higher on the list right now.”

Washington may have already ensured that geopolitics will be at the center of the rally. Earlier this week, the US government imposed sanctions on two dozen Chinese and Hong Kong officials after Beijing further restricted people in the city from freely choosing their leaders. Blinken criticized China on Tuesday during a meeting with his counterparts in Tokyo, where he accused Beijing of threatening regional stability.

Neither side has indicated that they see Anchorage as a place for meaningful change in their relationship. The Biden administration has emphasized that the summit is “a one-off meeting” that is “very much a first meeting.” And Beijing has said it does not have “high hopes” for the event.

“Downplaying hopes for the meeting reflects domestic politics – on the US side, Biden wants to avoid appearing too soft on Beijing – but also the broader state of the relationship,” Eurasia Group analysts wrote last week. a research note. “Neither the US nor China are willing to make concessions that the other sees fit to meaningfully ease tensions.”

Meanwhile, human rights issues may actually exacerbate some of the major economic pain points on the road.

The rivalry between the US and China in technology and trade will not end because Joe Biden is president
The United States expressed concern about Xinjiang last year in decisions to restrict imports that region – an effort to prevent goods made by forced labor from entering the U.S. market. (Beijing has long defended its crackdown in Xinjiang as necessary to tackle extremism and terrorism. And contrary to accusations that it is forcing people there into labor camps, it claims its facilities are voluntary ‘training centers’ where people have vocational skills, language and laws.)

The Biden government will link human rights issues to exports [and] technology sales, “said Alex Capri, a research fellow at Hinrich Foundation and a visiting senior fellow at National University of Singapore.” Expect more export controls and sanctions against Chinese interests. “

Capri and others also say the United States will continue to do what it can to separate parts of its economy from China. He pointed to Biden’s recent efforts to overhaul US supply chains – a move widely seen as an attempt to ensure that critical products and supplies are not obligated to Beijing.

Biden’s ‘Build Back Better’ platform is actually a more cohesive version of [Make America Great Again], when it comes to reshaping and shielding strategic industries, “Capri told CNN Business, noting possible efforts to remove China from the pharmaceutical, semiconductor, battery, rare earth and artificial intelligence chains as” just the beginning. “.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misrepresented Xinjiang’s location in China.

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