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SHANGHAI — Amid growing U.S. worries that Russia’s war on Ukraine is being made possible by Chinese support for Moscow’s defense industry, Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in China on Wednesday on a three-day mission to push leaders to cut ties with the Kremlin.

The conversations in Shanghai and Beijing will be aimed at managing an increasingly thorny and contentious relationship, with ongoing disputes about China’s role in the war in Ukraine, Beijing’s broad claims over the South China Sea and U.S. efforts to reduce dependence on China’s technology manufacturing sector.

The Senate’s passage on Tuesday of a bill <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/04/23/tiktok-ban-senate-vote-sale-biden/" target=_blank>requiring the Chinese owners of TikTok</a> to divest from their company was sure to add additional contention on the Chinese side.

This will be the top American diplomat’s second visit to China since relations hit bottom early last year when a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/02/07/china-spy-balloon-intelligence/" target=_blank>Chinese spy balloon</a> floated across the continental United States.

American officials played down expectations for breakthroughs but said it was important to keep talking. More than two years into wide-ranging Western sanctions against Russia, the Biden administration blames China for what it says is a systematic effort to keep Moscow’s defense sector afloat, enabling further civilian deaths in Ukraine. Officials hope to deliver a message coordinated with Europe, which they believe will be more effective than the United States making a solo push.

“When it comes to Russia’s defense industrial base, the primary contributor in this moment to that is China,” Blinken told reporters last week after a meeting of leading world economies in Italy, saying that China has been sharing machine tools, semiconductors and other items that have helped Russia rebuild its defense industry two years into its full-scale war in Ukraine.

“If China purports on the one hand to want good relations with Europe and other countries, it can’t on the other hand be fueling what is the biggest threat to European security since the end of the Cold War,” Blinken said.

Beijing has bristled at Washington placing Ukraine front and center of attempts to thaw relations. Ukraine is “not an issue between China and the United States. The U.S. side should not turn it into one,” a senior Foreign Ministry official said in an unusually long and detailed rundown of Beijing’s demands for talks in a statement released on Tuesday.

Blinken’s <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/06/19/blinken-china-xi-jinping-meeting/" target="_blank">last trip to China</a>, in June, marked the resumption of communications after a period of near-silence between high-level leaders in both countries following a trip by former House speaker <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/03/pelosi-taiwan-visit-china-response-military/" target="_blank">Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan</a> in August 2022. Blinken was poised to make a trip that was canceled when the spy balloon floated across America just days before his scheduled departure.

But in recent months a steady stream of Cabinet secretaries has visited Beijing, while Chinese officials have made the return trip to the United States. Blinken isn’t even the first member of President Biden’s Cabinet to visit China this month, after Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen led an economic delegation and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/04/05/janet-yellen-china-chopsticks/" target="_blank">charmed her hosts</a> by drinking beers in Beijing — even as she threatened <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/04/08/china-beijing-janet-yellen-manufacturing/" target="_blank">sharper tariffs</a> on steel and aluminum.

Still, with Chinese leader Xi Jinping showing little inclination to dial back his increasingly aggressive approach to projecting his nation’s power in the world, the United States is devoting significant diplomatic bandwidth to ringfencing China.

Florence Lo

Biden and Blinken are building ties to China’s neighbors to try to discourage it from making moves against Taiwan, which Beijing claims as its own, and to warn it off its confrontational stance toward the sea fleets of other nations in the South China Sea. Earlier this month, Biden <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/04/09/japanese-prime-minister-visit-biden-kishida/" target=_blank>met the leaders of Japan</a> and the Philippines together in the White House, part of a broader U.S. push to build small groupings of countries to work together to respond to Chinese activity.

Beijing has been especially unsettled by that U.S. strategy, arguing that the Biden administration is rerunning the Cold War playbook of containment that it once deployed against the Soviet Union. U.S. officials fire back that if China’s neighbors feel threatened and want to work with each other to bolster their security, then Beijing should reexamine the way it is projecting its power.

Still, the relationship is far more stable than it was a year ago, and China appears to be signaling that it does not want to risk crossing the reddest of U.S. red lines. It has dialed back its rhetoric and military activity around Taiwan in recent months. And — after the Biden administration delivered a stark warning — it still has not sent weaponry to Russia, Blinken said last week.

But U.S. officials say that even the current levels of Chinese support for the Kremlin are far too much. They have warned counterparts that if Chinese companies keep supplying embargoed dual-use components to Russia, they could face crippling sanctions of their own.

“We’re prepared to take steps when we believe necessary against firms that are taking steps in contravention to our interests,” a senior State Department official said ahead of the trip, speaking to reporters under ground rules of anonymity to discuss sensitive planning considerations. “Our objective will be to clearly make the case what the implications are of this support and why that may in fact not be in China’s interest going forward.”

The United States won’t be able to “drive a wedge” between China and Russia, so Blinken’s goal is to convince Xi that Beijing will bear “unacceptable consequences” if it doesn’t stop enabling Putin’s war effort, said Bonnie Glaser, managing director of the Indo-Pacific program at the German Marshall Fund, a think tank.

To appeal to the Chinese leader’s interests, the United States needs to show him that curbing support of Russia can help stabilize relations with Washington, Glaser said. “China really does not want to be front and center in our election campaign,” she added.

A key goal for China is to ease American export controls on advanced technologies, after Xi warned Biden in San Francisco that more restrictions could “deprive the Chinese people of their right to development.”

Still, some officials said they did not expect an immediate shift in Chinese behavior. With Biden already working to isolate Chinese industry and detach trade ties to Beijing, he has less leverage over China’s economy than in the past. Nor is China in the mood to split from the Kremlin, viewing Russia as a key partner in a world it sees as largely under by U.S. hegemony.

According to Shi Yinhong, a scholar at Renmin University in Beijing, there remain 16 sources of serious tension in the relationship, “none of which have seen lasting mitigation even with more dialogue since [former president Donald] Trump left office.”

On his list are military activity around Taiwan and in the South China Sea; human rights in Hong Kong and Xinjiang; decoupling in technology industries and efforts to safeguard supply chains; and growing ideological competition as part of a new Cold War. “On every major issue there is an established pattern,” Shi said. “It’s very difficult to make positive change.”

This article originally paraphrased Glaser as saying that Blinken needed to convince Xi the United States was not trying to drive a wedge between China and Russia. She merely said that was not achievable for Blinken to do this. This article has been updated.

Member of the "Pegasus Project" team that won a George Polk Award, 2021.

Yale University, BA in History

Deep Springs College

Michael Birnbaum is a national security reporter for The Washington Post, covering the State Department and diplomacy. He previously served more than a decade in Europe as The Post’s bureau chief in Brussels, Moscow and Berlin, reporting from more than 40 countries, and he covered climate and security from Washington. He joined The Post in 2008.

Michael Birnbaum

Human Rights Press Awards, the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, Hong Kong, 2019

Oxford University, BA in Philosophy & Psychology

University of Nottingham Ningbo, MA in Contemporary Chinese Studies

Tsinghua University, diploma in Mandarin Chinese

Christian Shepherd is China correspondent for The Washington Post. He previously covered the country for the Financial Times and Reuters from Beijing.

Christian Shepherd

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Blinken set to visit China, curb support for Russia’s war in Ukraine

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U.S. Secretary of State Blinken visits China

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