On Wednesday of last week police in Washington escorted a convoy of vehicles from the city out to Dulles airport in northern Virginia, about 41km away.
The passengers were not senior politicians or diplomats – but rather three pandas.
Two adult pandas and their three-year-old cub – who had been the star attractions at Washington Zoo for years – were going back to China.
The arrival of two earlier pandas in Washington following the landmark visit by Richard Nixon to Beijing in 1972 was seen as a sign of a new ties between the United States and China.
It may be common practice for zoos across the world to return pandas to China when they reach certain ages. However, the departures last week were also viewed by some in the US as symbolic of the deterioration in relations between Washington and Beijing.
Last February, links hit a low point after a Chinese balloon – which the Biden administration insisted was engaged in spying – flew across a large part of the continental United States before being shot down off the coast of Virginia.
The balloon incident caused significant embarrassment to the Biden administration. It prompted strong criticism from opposition Republicans, many of whom focus on what they see as threats posed by China while not being nearly as critical of, for example, Russian president Vladimir Putin.
Nine months on US president Joe Biden will this week hold bilateral talks with Chinese leader Xi Jinping on the margins of the Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation summit in San Francisco.
The White House said the two would discuss bilateral relations, the continued importance of maintaining open lines of communication and a range of regional and global issues.
It said they would also discuss how the US and China “can continue to responsibly manage competition and work together where our interests align, particularly on transnational challenges that affect the international community”.
On Sunday US national security adviser Jake Sullivan told broadcaster CBS that “the president is determined to see the re-establishment of military-to-military ties”.
In August last year China said it was ending dialogue with the United States in a number of areas, including between military commanders and on climate change, in response to a visit by Nancy Pelosi, the then speaker of the House of Representatives, to Taiwan.
The US has maintained that in recent months there have been a number of close calls as Chinese aircraft sought to intercept US planes over the over the South and East China seas.
There has also been speculation that the White House will this week ask China to stop the flow of the synthetic opioid, fentanyl, into the United States, where it has fuelled a surge in deaths from overdoses.
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In advance of the meeting on Wednesday there has been a flurry of diplomatic activity. China’s foreign minister Wang Yi was in Washington last month. US treasury secretary Janet Yellen visited Beijing while Biden’s climate change envoy John Kerry met his Chinese opposite number.
However, no significant breakthroughs are being anticipated for the Biden/Xi talks.
Last week at a press briefing Dr Bonny Lin, senior fellow for Asian security and director of the China Power Project at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) – a think tank in Washington –, said that neither side were expecting to significantly improve or reset the relationship.
“Both countries are expecting a potentially rocky year in 2024 with the Taiwan presidential elections in January 2024 but also the US presidential elections in November 2024.”
Jude Blanchette, who holds the Freeman chair in China studies at the CSIS, said the upcoming Taiwan election was going to be a key point for Xi in the talks this week. He suggested the Chinese side would probably push Biden to make some public comments on Taiwan.
“Maybe this is a declaration consistent with long-standing US policy but still some sort of language about not supporting Taiwan independence. But I think the administration would be hesitant to do anything like this, given that we are about two months away from the Taiwan election.”
Prof Blanchette suggested that another key issue that Beijing would want to include in the talks this week would be technology.
“It is clear that they’re coming to understand that the Biden administration is pursuing a path that is probably even more aggressive than the Trump administration in terms of its sophistication, breadth and scope of some of the technology restrictions that they’ve been applying to China. And so Beijing sees the upcoming meeting as an opportunity to try to shift the trajectory, or at least find ways to put brakes on the pace of US actions.”
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