Secretary of State Antony Blinken landed in Shanghai, China, on Wednesday afternoon for meetings with senior officials, receiving no significant honors upon his landing and preceded by loud warnings from the Foreign Ministry to avoid challenging the Communist Party on its belligerent policies.
Blinken is expected to stay in China for three days, beginning his journey in the economic heart of China, Shanghai, and then traveling north to Beijing to meet top officials. According to the State Department, Blinken is expected to address a wide variety of international issues, many of them not directly relevant to China such as “the crisis in the Middle East [and] Russia’s war against Ukraine.”
The State Department did list “cross-Strait issues,” meaning China’s routine threats against the nation of Taiwan, and China illegal actions in the South China Sea among topics of discussion.
Onlookers watch U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken at Yu Gardens in Shanghai on April 24, 2024. ( MARK SCHIEFELBEIN/POOL/AFP via Getty)
“The Secretary will also discuss ongoing work to fulfill the commitments made by Presidents Biden and Xi at the Woodside Summit in November on resuming counternarcotics cooperation, military-to-military communication, artificial intelligence, and strengthening people-to-people ties,” the State Department said in a statement.
Blinken himself described his mission to China in a post on social media on Wednesday as intended to include “intensive face-to-face diplomacy.”
“Our ongoing, direct engagement is vital,” Blinken asserted.
I head to Shanghai and Beijing this week for intensive face-to-face diplomacy. Our ongoing, direct engagement is vital for making progress on issues that matter most to the American people and the world. pic.twitter.com/VyWOxPhJpk
— Secretary Antony Blinken (@SecBlinken) April 24, 2024
Blinken landed in Shanghai to a bare tarmac and no recognizable high-ranking officials waiting for him. Hu Xijin, the former editor-in-chief and occasional commentator for the Chinese state-run Global Times, mocked Blinken and described his visit as “imploring.”
🔹Blinken has arrived in Shanghai, China🇨🇳.
— Hu Xijin 胡锡进 (@HuXijin_GT) April 24, 2024
🔹Many people noticed when he stepped off the plane, there seemed to be no red carpet on the ground.
🔹His China visit should be seen as an “imploring” one, although the US made some tough public opinion preparations in advance. pic.twitter.com/t0KFXH8vnj
The Global Times itself published an energetic article on Wednesday warning Blinken to stay away from “misconceptions and misperceptions about China,” referring to real actions that Chinese communist officials are taking that are harmful to mankind. Among them is the ongoing genocide of ethnic Turkic people in occupied East Turkistan, most prominently the Uyghur people, which the State Department condemned in its annual human rights report published on Monday.
“As everyone knows, the so-called ‘ethnic genocide’ in Xinjiang [East Turkistan] is an outright ‘lie of the century,'” the Global Times claimed, denying the extensive evidence of forced sterilizations and abortions, slavery, imprisonment in concentration camps, and other atrocities.
“Some of the differences between China and the US stem from either America’s fundamental misunderstanding of China’s true situation or deliberately portraying China as a rival of the US and distorting perceptions of China for the purpose of containing China,” the state propaganda outlet claimed.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry previewed Blinken’s visit on Tuesday with a similarly aggressive denial of the genocide the country has been conducting since 2017.
“The Chinese people have the best say on the human rights situation in China. China made history by eliminating absolute poverty,” spokesman Wang Wenbin claimed, denying the genocide in its entirety. “We practice whole-process people’s democracy and provide the world’s largest education system, social security system and medical care system in China. The Chinese people’s sense of gain, happiness and security keeps getting stronger.”
Wang also condemned rumors based on anonymous sources that leftist President Joe Biden was considering sanctioning China over its support of Russia in its ongoing invasion of Ukraine.
“The United States keeps making groundless accusations over the normal trade and economic exchanges between China and Russia, while passing a bill providing a large amount of aid for Ukraine,” Wang told reporters. “This is just hypocritical and highly irresponsible. China firmly rejects this.”
U.S Secretary of State Antony Blinken (centre L) and US Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns walk through the Yu Gardens in Shanghai on April 24, 2024. (MARK SCHIEFELBEIN/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
Wang later insisted that the Biden administration should not in any way seek to interrupt China’s access to the bountiful American economic market, despite China’s rampant economic malfeasance and the corrosive effect of Beijing competing with American companies by using slavery to undercut prices.
“Let me point out again that China-US economic ties benefit both sides and there’s no winner in a trade war,” Wang claimed, demanding the end of limited tariffs on Chinese companies. “We urge the US to follow WTO [World Trade Organization] rules, lift all additional tariffs on China and stop imposing new ones. China will take all necessary measures to safeguard its rights and interests.”
It is unclear at press time to what extent Blinken will address China’s negative effect on the American markets or its role in several major social problems in America, such as the fentanyl epidemic and cybersecurity concerns. Blinken has been the protagonist of some of China’s most spectacular embarrassments of American officials in recent memory. The most prominent such disaster occurred early in his tenure as secretary of state: the disastrous encounter in Alaska in March 2021 with Chinese diplomats Yang Jiechi and Wang Yi in which Yang ranted for 16 minutes about “Black Lives Matter” and alleged human rights abuses in America. China is currently conducting an open genocide against the indigenous Turkic people of occupied East Turkistan, in addition to committing a long list of other atrocities left unmentioned by Blinken at the time – as documented by the State Department this week.
The Chinese Communist Party considered that meeting such as resounding victory over America that it sold commemorative tote bags and mobile phone cases with quotes from Yang’s diatribe on them.
More recently, Blinken met with genocidal dictator Xi Jinping in Beijing in June, reportedly seeking to emphasize economic harmony and minimizing conflict with the rogue communist state. He did not publicly condemn the regime for its gross human rights atrocities or challenge it on its rampant intellectual property theft, the establishment of illegal police stations on sovereign American territory, the invasion of American airspace with an espionage balloon in early 2023, or its outsized role in the international fentanyl trade.
“One of the important things for me to do on this trip was to disabuse our Chinese hosts of the notion that we are seeking to economically contain them. We’re not,” Blinken told reporters during a press briefing in Beijing in June. “And as I’ve said, we are not about decoupling; we’re about de-risking and diversifying.”
Blinken continued to say that it was “very in our [America’s] interest to continue doing business with China.
