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Global Impact: US-China relations remain on a knife-edge even after latest olive branch
- Global Impact is a weekly curated newsletter featuring a news topic originating in China with a significant macro impact for our newsreaders around the world
- In this edition, we attempt to unpack and break down the latest comings and goings of relations between Beijing and Washington
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Developments in the US-China relationship come so quickly these days that the recent glimmers of hope for more constructive bilateral engagement, kindled by the meeting between Chinese President Xi Jinping and his counterpart Joe Biden in Indonesia last year, might seem like something in the mists of time.
“The world is big enough for the two countries to develop themselves and prosper together,” China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said about the November meeting.
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But whatever progress was being made by working groups on each side afterwards was undone by the emergence of a Chinese balloon with a commercial-jet-sized payload that drifted over US territory.
The Pentagon eventually shot the suspected spy balloon down, leading to a postponement of US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s planned trip to Beijing to continue work aimed at building a floor under a bilateral relationship in free fall.
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Blinken and other Biden administration officials were then on their back foot, defending against allegations by most Republicans and even some Democrats that their decision to wait until the balloon was over the Atlantic Ocean – after traversing hundreds of miles of US airspace for several days – constituted a national security breach.
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