Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken cheered on the sidelines at a basketball game in Shanghai on Wednesday night and spent Thursday talking to students on the campus of New York University in Shanghai and meeting with American entrepreneurs. It all emphasized the kinds of economic, educational, and cultural ties that the United States emphatically views as beneficial to both countries.
But hanging over those pleasantries during his visit to China this week are several steps the U.S. is taking to sever economic ties in areas where the Biden administration says they threaten American interests. And these will also be the focus of more attention from Chinese officials.
Even as the Biden administration tries to stabilize relations with China, it is introducing several economic measures that would limit China’s access to the US economy and technology. The country is poised to raise tariffs on Chinese steel, solar panels and other crucial products to protect American factories from cheap imports. The country is considering further restrictions on China’s access to advanced semiconductors to try to stop Beijing from developing advanced artificial intelligence that could be used on the battlefield.
This week, Congress also passed legislation that would force ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese owner, to sell its stake in the app within nine to 12 months or leave the United States altogether. The president signed it on Wednesday, although the measure is likely to be challenged in court.
Mr Blinken’s visit, which was expected to take him to Beijing on Friday for high-level government meetings, had a much more cordial tone than the trip he made to China last year. That trip was the first after a Chinese spy balloon passed through the United States, sending the American public into an uproar.
At a meeting with the secretary of the Communist Party of Shanghai on Thursday morning, Mr Blinken said direct engagement between the US and China is both valuable and necessary.
“We have an obligation to our people – and indeed an obligation to the world – to manage the relationship between our two countries responsibly,” he said.
Speaking to students on NYU’s Shanghai campus later that morning, he said the educational exchanges the students were engaged in were a “ballast” to a complicated and confrontational relationship.
Since President Biden met Chinese leader Xi Jinping in California in November, the U.S.-China relationship has appeared more stable, with nothing to match the dramatic ups and downs of trade wars under former President Donald J. Trump.
But the Biden administration is still marching toward a more restrictive economic relationship with China.
This includes the control of semiconductor technology, which is being discussed by both sides as a more prominent issue than ever before. The Biden administration has considered further export controls, especially on factories that have helped produce advanced semiconductors for Chinese tech giant Huawei.
“By explicitly seeking to downgrade Chinese technological capabilities, especially in advanced AI, the United States has moved export controls to the forefront of the U.S.-China agenda,” said Emily Benson, a trade expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.
In a phone call between Mr Biden and Mr Xi earlier this month, both leaders raised technology controls as matters of central importance.
Mr. Biden emphasized that the United States will continue to take necessary steps to prevent advanced American technologies from being used to undermine its own national security, without unnecessarily restricting trade and investment, the White House said.
Mr Xi said imposing new sanctions on China would not “reduce the risks” but would introduce risks. If the United States was determined to “curtail China’s hi-tech development and deprive China of its legitimate right to development, China will not sit back and watch,” he said, according to the official Xinhua News Agency.
U.S. officials say their restrictions are necessary given China’s authoritarian government and state economic model. But these measures have rattled China’s leaders and pushed tensions over economic measures to their highest point in years.
The moves don’t just come from the U.S. government: Susan Shirk, the author of “Overreach: How China Derailed Its Peaceful Rise,” said China has focused on a more self-sufficient industrial policy and tried to replace the United States. States as a high-tech superpower under Mr Xi.
“Xi openly acknowledges that while he wants China to be less dependent on other countries, he wants to keep other countries dependent on China ‘as a powerful countermeasure and deterrent’, as he put it, ‘against supply cuts’,” said Mrs. Shirk said.
China, too, has allowed security concerns to affect more of its economy, while Mr. Xi and other Chinese leaders have sought to reassure foreign companies that their investments are welcome. A new national security law has expanded Beijing’s reach into Hong Kong, threatening the city’s status as a financial center. U.S. executives are alarmed by China’s investigations into foreign companies, as well as the country’s broader rules against sharing data and information with foreigners.
Despite China’s complaints about the US government’s efforts to crack down on TikTok, China itself has banned other Western social media services for decades. Apple said last week that Beijing had ordered it to remove WhatsApp and Threads from app stores in China.
Mr. Blinken and other U.S. officials have emphasized that U.S. export controls, sanctions and other restrictions imposed on Chinese technology companies apply to only a small part of the broader U.S.-China relationship. Elsewhere, the trade is being encouraged, they say.
In a report this week, the US-China Business Council, a group of 270 US companies doing business in China, estimated that US exports to China supported more than 900,000 US jobs in 2022, although goods exports fell in 2023 due to the mediocre Chinese economy. economy, US tariffs and other factors.
“It is important for us to remind U.S. lawmakers and those in positions of influence that each state and congressional district in the U.S. maintains its own economic and trade relationship with China, and that changes in U.S.-China trade policy must be considered very carefully considered,” he said. Craig Allen, the group’s president.