Despite the Biden administration’s recent attempts to talk tough on China, calling it a ‘strategic competitor’, both sides have been talking behind the scenes with an aim toward balancing relations, to ensure recent years of antagonism doesn’t veer into conflict.

US national security adviser Jake Sullivan starting Tuesday is meeting over a period of two days with his Chinese counterpart, senior foreign policy official Wang Yi in the Chinese capital. “President Biden has been very clear in his conversations with President Xi that he is committed to managing this important relationship responsibly,” Sullivan told Wang just ahead of the rare talks. Crucially this is the first trip by a sitting US national security advisor to China in eight years (since 2016).

AFP/Getty Images

Sullivan’s visit to the outskirts of Beijing where the meetings are being held will last until Thursday, and little is expected to be published or revealed in the aftermath. The immediate goal is the restoration of positive and more frequent communications, which broke down for most of 2022-2023.

“The key is to keep to the overall direction of mutual respect, peaceful co-existence, and win-win cooperation,” Wang has said. He called recent China-US ties “critical” but admitted the relationship has of late taken “twists and turns”.

China’s foreign affairs ministry in a separate statement said, “China will focus on expressing serious concerns, clarifying its solemn position and making serious demands on the Taiwan issue, the right to development and China’s strategic security.”

Also on the agenda is the expansion and normalization of military-to-military talks in order to avoid confrontation in places like the South China Sea, as well as efforts at de-confliction in the Taiwan Strait, along with discussion of Washington’s desire for China to crackdown on the development and distribution of chemicals that can be made into fentanyl.

High on Beijing’s agenda will be US tariffs, particularly those targeting Chinese chip makers. “The United States has continuously taken unreasonable measures against China in terms of tariffs, export controls, investment reviews and unilateral sanctions, which have seriously undermined China’s legitimate rights and interests,” the Chinese foreign ministry statement laid out.

Extensive piece in FT about the back channel discourse between the US and China lead by Sullivan and Wang Yi. The various relatively low-profile meetings set the stage for containing some of the tension in the Sino-American relationship creating some predictability.

There are,… pic.twitter.com/dbQ0J5F7VS

— Ali Ahmadi (@AliR_Ahmadi) August 27, 2024

Meanwhile, Financial Times in a fresh investigative report issued this week has described that leading up to this historic meeting, both Sullivan and Wang had met quietly to stabilize relations in ‘cloak and dagger’ summits around the world. This had reportedly gone on since 2023 in the aftermath of the Chinese spy balloon fiasco over the American east coast.