Secretary of State Antony Blinken is starting three days of talks with senior Chinese officials in Shanghai and Beijing this week with U.S.-China ties at a critical point over numerous global disputes. The mere fact that Blinken is making the trip — shortly after a conversation between President Joe Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, a similar visit to China by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and a call between the U.S. and Chinese defense chiefs — might be seen by some as encouraging, but ties between Washington and Beijing are tense and the rifts are growing wider. From Russia and Ukraine to Israel, Iran and the broader Middle East as well as Indo-Pacific and trade issues, the U.S. and China are on a series of collision courses that have sparked fears about military and strategic security as well as international economic stability.
The hunt for the origins of COVID-19 has gone dark in China, the victim of political infighting after a series of stalled and thwarted attempts to find the source of the virus that killed millions and paralyzed the world for months. The Chinese government froze meaningful domestic and international efforts to trace the virus from the first weeks of the outbreak, despite statements supporting open scientific inquiry, an Associated Press investigation found. The investigation drew on thousands of pages of undisclosed emails and documents and dozens of interviews that showed the freeze began far earlier than previously known and involved political and scientific infighting in China as much as international finger-pointing.