China stalls Antony Blinken’s Beijing visit over ‘spy balloon’ concerns

China is refusing to let US secretary of state Antony Blinken visit Beijing over concerns that the FBI will release the results of an investigation into the downed suspected Chinese spy balloon.

Four people familiar with the negotiations said China had told the US it was not prepared to reschedule a trip that Blinken cancelled in February while it remains unclear what the administration of president Joe Biden will do with the report.

The FBI has been analysing debris salvaged from the balloon since it was shot down in February. The US says the craft was spying on sensitive military sites, but China say it was a weather balloon blown off course by weather.

Chinese officials are concerned the Biden administration could release the FBI report along with physical evidence from the balloon, and that its findings could be made public during Blinken’s trip to China.

China’s foreign minister Qin Gang raised the issue with Americans attending the China Development Forum in Beijing last month, said three people familiar with the meeting.

Qin described the FBI investigation as another example of the issues that have made it difficult to stabilise US-China ties, one of the people said. US officials stress the crisis was sparked by China flying the balloon through the country’s airspace.

The FBI and National Security Council declined to say whether the investigation would be made public.

The issue has also sparked divisions inside the Biden administration, with some officials wanting to declassify the evidence for public release to show that the balloon was conducting surveillance. Congress is also likely to press for the release of the FBI’s conclusions.

But others say that releasing the information would derail efforts to restart badly needed high-level engagement between the countries at a time when US-China relations are at their lowest level since the two countries established diplomatic relations in 1979.

Blinken was supposed to meet President Xi Jinping in China in February but abruptly cancelled his trip because of the balloon.

Bonnie Glaser, a China expert at the German Marshall Fund, said Beijing’s stance reflected its concerns about how the US would continue to use the episode.

“Beijing is distrustful of US intent and worries the US will use the information gleaned from the balloon investigation in ways harmful to Chinese interests,” Glaser said.

Dennis Wilder, a former Asia adviser to George W Bush, said there was a “good chance” Beijing would not give the green light while uncertainty about the FBI report remained.

“In many ways, we are more eager for this visit than they are,” he said. “They don’t have the incentive to make this visit happen quickly. In that sense, for the Chinese, the downsides of waiting are not great.”

China had also been reluctant to agree to a Blinken visit because of frustration that US lawmakers, including House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, met Taiwan’s president Tsai Ing-wen this month, said several people familiar with the situation.

The Chinese embassy in Washington said Beijing was “firmly opposed to the US continuously making use of the [balloon] incident for political purposes and hyping up the ‘China threat’.”

Spokesperson Liu Pengyu said China “cannot but seriously question the independence, openness and transparency of the so-called investigation”. He said both countries had an obligation to “calmly and prudently handle some unexpected situations” after Xi and Biden had agreed about the importance of maintaining communications at all levels.

While the two sides fail to reach agreement about a Blinken visit, there has been some engagement. Rick Waters, the top state department China official, recently visited Beijing and Cui Tiankai, a former Chinese ambassador to the US, visited Washington.

In other areas, however, there has been almost no engagement. Michael Chase, the Pentagon’s top China official, has been unable to meet his Chinese counterpart in Washington since he visited Taiwan in February, in only the second visit to the island by a senior defence official in four decades.

China “continues to decline requests for engagement with the secretary of defence, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, [Indo-Pacific commander] Admiral [John] Aquilino, and other senior department of defence officials,” said Martin Meiners, a Pentagon spokesperson.

Asked by the Financial Times this week about his travel plans, Blinken said it was “important to maintain channels of communication” to China to make sure that both sides were “speaking to each other clearly”.

“When it comes to my own visit to China, when the conditions are right I’ll certainly look forward to pursuing that,” the top US diplomat added.

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