Biden Sees Potential Thaw with China After Tough G-7 Statement

President calls balloon incident silly and says Washington, Beijing should be talking more

<G-7 communiqué>

President Biden said Sunday (21.05.2023) he expected a thaw in relations with China, a day after he and other Group of Seven leaders took steps to tackle what they see as Beijing’s economic intimidation.

Biden said at a news conference wrapping up the G-7 meeting in Japan that the U.S. wants to open more lines of communication with China.

“Then this silly balloon that was carrying two freight cars worth of spy equipment was flying over the United States and it got shot down and everything changed in terms of talking to one another,” Biden said, referring to an incident early this year involving a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon.

“I think you’re going to see that begin to thaw very shortly,” he said.

Biden’s upbeat assessment followed a challenging few months that also included a U.S. warning to China not to arm Russia in the Ukraine war and conflict over a stop-off in the U.S. by Taiwan’s president.

White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan held recent talks in Vienna with China’s top foreign-affairs official, Wang Yi, and China’s commerce minister is scheduled to visit the U.S. in coming days.

Biden said easing U.S. sanctions on China’s defense minister, Gen. Li Shangfu, was under discussion. Li remains under sanctions levied in 2018 when he ran the People’s Liberation Army’s armaments departments and purchased combat aircraft and missile equipment from Russia.

The Biden administration has expressed hope that it could reschedule a visit to China by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who canceled a planned trip in February over the balloon incident.

Significant irritants remain across the U.S.-China relationship.

On Sunday, the Cyberspace Administration of China said its review of products from Micron Technology found “significant security risks” that would affect national security and warned operators of key Chinese information infrastructure—such as telecommunications companies and state-owned banks—against purchasing the company’s goods.

“We are evaluating the conclusion and assessing our next steps,” Micron said. “We look forward to continuing to engage in discussions with Chinese authorities.”

The move against Micron was announced as G-7 leaders departed Hiroshima and represents an example of the “economic coercion” that the leaders spent much of their time in at the summit pledging to combat. Now it will set up a new test as to whether the leaders can work together to deter Beijing from targeting companies while also maintaining ties to China.

The Chinese ban came less than two months after Beijing announced an investigation into imports from Micron, the largest memory-chip maker in the U.S., in what seemed a political gesture aimed at hitting back at a sweeping ban Washington put in place late last year on selling advanced chip-making technology to China.

China was a focal point for the G-7 leaders during the summit.

A G-7 communiqué said the nations would “counter malign practices” by China and “foster resilience to economic coercion.”

They said they would create a platform to confront “attempts to weaponize economic dependencies,” a reference to what the countries see as China’s history of using its economic might to mete out political retribution.

As the leaders met, Chinese President Xi Jinping hosted his China-Central Asia Summit, which some U.S. leaders saw as an attempt to counterbalance the G-7 meetings.

Beijing officials said the U.S. was itself guilty of economic coercion. They said Washington was trying to weaponize trade and choke off business that companies in allied nations hoped to do in China.

A representative of China’s embassy in the U.K. on Sunday described the G-7 summit in Hiroshima as a failure. The group of leading democracies “spared no effort to create bloc confrontation, undermine regional stability and suppress the development of other countries,” the representative said.

A G-7 statement on economic security didn’t mention China in its four pages but clearly had recent examples involving Beijing in mind.

In one case, China halted most of its imports from Lithuania in 2021 after the Baltic nation allowed Taiwan, the self-ruled island Beijing considers part of its territory, to open a representative office under the name “Taiwan.” Such attempts “will fail and face consequences,” the G-7 document said.

It also said the G-7 nations would work on “preventing the cutting-edge technologies we develop from being used to further military capabilities” in places like China.

At his news conference, Biden said he didn’t believe conflict with China was inevitable but said the U.S. would help Taiwan defend itself if needed.

“There is a clear understanding of most of our allies that if China were to act unilaterally there would be a response,” Biden said.