United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken concluded his two-day trip to Beijing. Based on post-meeting readouts and reports, there was little breakthrough. Beijing took full advantage of the opportunity to humiliate Blinken and the United States from the beginning to the end.
Blinken was supposed to visit Beijing in early February. He postponed his trip after Americans spotted a Chinese spy balloon floating in the sky, which sparked public fury. But since the spy balloon incident, the CCP has done little to improve the Sino-U.S. relationship. The senior leadership of the Chinese military refused to pick up their U.S. counterpart’s phone calls or requests for meetings. Instead, the People’s Liberation Army’s fighter jets and warships conducted several aggressive maneuvers near a U.S. Navy surveillance plane and a destroyer over the South China Sea, endangering all parties involved. Yet the Chinese defense minister justified the PLA’s provocative actions with inflammatory remarks, warning the U.S. to “mind your own business.”
Meanwhile, U.S. media discovered the Chinese spy balloon shot down by the U.S. military in February was not some kind of low-tech “silly balloon,” as President Biden claimed. According to NBC News, the spy balloon “was able to gather intelligence from several sensitive American military sites. … China was able to control the balloon so it could make multiple passes over some of the sites (at times flying figure eight formations) and transmit the information it collected back to Beijing in real time…”
Last week, the American public also learned that
