Antony Blinken’s meeting with senior Chinese diplomat Wang Li ended at approximately half past noon, according to the State Department – an hour over the scheduled time.
The secretary of state’s afternoon is full of a variety of meetings, although they are all closed to the press.
He’s currently scheduled to be visiting with current and former exchange students. He then talks with US embassy personnel and local American business leaders.
There is still no mention of a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, although the secretary has open time remaining on his schedule later in the day before his planned evening press conference and departure for London.
High-level meetings between governments are normally pretty formal affairs and, even behind closed doors, can be rather boring… then again there was the Great Anchorage Meltdown.
At the first such high-level meeting between Beijing and Washington during the Biden presidency, attacks were being traded from the outset.
There were lots of heavy hitters in Alaska for the meeting: US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, national security adviser Jake Sullivan, China’s senior foreign policy official and politburo member Yang Jiechi, as well as then Foreign Minister Wang Yi.
There was none of this talk of “our two great nations working together”. It went straight into alleged cyber-attacks, economic coercion, Hong Kong’s crackdown and allegations of human rights abuses at Xinjiang.
Yang accused the US of using its “military force and financial hegemony to carry out long-arm jurisdiction and suppress other countries”.
Chinese nationalists ended up using some of the barbs from Beijing’s representatives and putting them on t-shirts, bags and even beer bottles as a kind of “take that” to the US.
story by Anthony Zurchar