Washington and Beijing are talking again Opinion by The Washington Post

When Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen arrived in Beijing in early July for a four-day visit, her Chinese greeter at the airport pointed skyward to a rainbow as an apparently auspicious sign for a restart in the United States and China’s fraught relationship. Chinese premier Li Qiang later referenced the heavenly symbolism, saying, “After experiencing a round of winds and rains, we surely can see a rainbow.”

According to an opinion piece by The Washington Post, it was indeed a positive sign, since it seems the last time US and Chinese officials were looking skyward and pointing, it was to gaze at a suspected Chinese spy balloon.

Ms Yellen’s trip came just weeks after Secretary of State Antony Blinken made his first foray to China as America’s top diplomat. John F. Kerry, the Biden administration’s climate envoy, is visiting now. And next is a possible visit by Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo.

There have been other exchanges in between. Mr Blinken on July 13 met with Chinese foreign policy chief Wang Yi in Jakarta, Indonesia, and in Washington, Chinese Ambassador Xie Feng met Ely Ratner, the US assistant secretary of defence for Indo-Pacific security affairs, to discuss the possibility of restarting military-to-military talks.

So far, this flurry of talks has not led to any real breakthroughs, and most analysts are playing down expectations. Ms Yellen, for example, reported only modest progress but called her talks with Chinese leaders a “step forward.” But even talks themselves are a good thing, since high-level, face-to-face communications had been largely frozen since last August, when then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) made her ill-timed trip to Taiwan. That’s almost a year, which is way too long.

Consider climate: Beijing, in a fit of pique over the Pelosi visit, cut off climate talks, meaning the world’s two largest economies (and its two largest polluters) had no direct high-level exchanges just as global temperatures reached their highest levels ever recorded. That is fiddling while the world burns.

Bilateral talks are important for reopening channels of communication, understanding each others’ intentions, and not allowing misunderstandings to fester and lead to potentially disastrous consequences. That’s why reestablishing military-to-military contacts is crucial, with US and Chinese forces operating in proximity in the waters of the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait.

Dialogue is also important for establishing a floor for when relations again spiral downward. And there will be more thorny issues ahead, with some coming relatively soon.

The United States is set to impose new export curbs on high-tech products to China, including quantum computing and semiconductor chips. A bill is working its way through Congress that could force the closure of three Hong Kong trade offices in Washington, New York and San Francisco, on the grounds that Hong Kong is no longer sufficiently autonomous from China, which imposed a harsh national security law on the territory in 2020. And the Biden administration will soon have to decide whether to grant an exception to allow Hong Kong’s sanctioned chief executive, John Lee, to travel to the United States in November to attend a summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation group.

Any of those decisions — or other unknowns — could again cause a rupture and increase tensions in the US-China relationship. But the damage can be contained if officials can talk directly to each other, explain intentions clearly and make sure the loudest, most extreme voices don’t prevail. Breakthroughs might still come, with more hard work. But for now, let’s keep talking.