The unglamorous importance of Sullivan's visit

Editor's note: Radhika Desai, a special commentator on current affairs for CGTN, is a professor of political studies at the University of Manitoba in Canada. The article reflects the author's opinions and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

How China-U.S. relations have deteriorated over the Trump and Biden presidencies becomes clear when we consider that U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan's visit to Beijing will be his first. By contrast, former National Security Advisor Susan Rice was frequently in Beijing and on occasion even met Chinese President Xi Jinping.

U.S. President Joe Biden opened his China file with U.S. Secretary of State Blinken's disastrous performance in Alaska and matters nosedived with the "spy balloon" in early 2023. Since then, many high-level meetings between U.S. officials and their Chinese counterparts have had to focus merely on "managing" the widening differences between Washington and Beijing, and preventing them from turning into open conflict.

This may be unglamourous but is critically important for China-U.S. relations and, given the increasing dysfunction of the U.S. as an international actor rooted in its mad domestic political obsession with China, for the world. As this obsession prompts the U.S.'s egregious and even offensive provocations towards China, meetings between officials of the two countries are tasked with preventing worse outcomes and minimizing the damage. Given the one-sidedness of U.S. provocations, China's diplomacy has needed to show the resilience, magnanimity and patience of a saint. This continues with Sullivan's visit, which is at the invitation of Wang Yi, member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and director of the Office of the Central Commission for Foreign Affairs. 

Notwithstanding some talk of planning a meeting between presidents Xi and Biden before the latter leaves office next January, the agenda for Sullivan's visit has been kept modest by both sides. China is expected to focus on its three major red lines, the Taiwan region, China's development rights, and its strategic security. On the U.S. side, a more diffuse set of points have been noted: the Taiwan region, technology-related national security policies, alleged Chinese military aid to Russia, the South China Sea and seeking China's cooperation over international conflicts including the ongoing Gaza horror (the pyromaniac asking for help from the fire brigade?).

Although many expected China-U.S. relations to improve under Biden after the trade war initiated during the Trump administration, they manifestly worsened and could continue doing so no matter what the outcome of the November presidential elections simply because neither party has any alternative to the neoliberal policies that lie at the core of the U.S.'s China obsession.

As neoliberal economic policies – lowering social spending, deregulating big capital, encouraging rentier activity and outsourcing, making taxes more and more regressive – deindustrialized the U.S., generated inequality and subjected working people to low wages, precarity and inflation, social divisions and political polarization have eroded support for both main parties. 

Former U.S. President Donald Trump blazed the new trail. He showed that Republicans could win the working-class electorate hypocritically neglected by its "natural" party by telling it a big lie: that the cause of working-class distress was not the neoliberal policies pursued by successive U.S. administrations since Ronald Reagan but, wait for it … China.

Without a more effective lie to tell, the Biden Democrats followed Trump's lead in the trade war and added military provocation over China's Taiwan region. Harris promises worse. In her recent acceptance speech, she not only promised to make sure that "America, not China, wins the competition for the 21st century," but also to "strengthen, not abdicate, our global leadership," in which Taiwan features centrally. Harris has previously expressed support for Biden's approach to Taiwan, which included threatening war several times.

As the election campaign heats up, Harris and Trump will seek to outdo each other on aggression towards China.

While the U.S. corporate capitalist class that funds U.S. politicians is far more open to Trump, he, in return, is far more willing to carry out its wishes, including the wishes of the war profiteers who are driving the U.S.'s aggressive agenda on Taiwan.

Thus, any divide between a Taiwan-obsessed Harris and a trade war-mongering Trump will vanish to produce a new bi-partisanship doubling down on economic and military aggression towards China. As it does, all advances made during the Wang-Sullivan meeting will be called on to maintain peace.

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