With visit to China, Blinken clears a diplomatic path, but it’s unclear where it

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken shakes hands with Chinese President Xi Jinping in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Monday.

Leah Millis/AP

Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s long-anticipated trip to Beijing shows that the administration is keen to reignite diplomacy and inject some stability to its dealings with China, but whether it was a success remains to be seen.

Blinken held talks with China’s top two foreign policy officials and even had an audience with leader Xi Jinping during his two-day stop in Beijing that ended on Monday.

But Analysts say China-U.S. ties are so fraught that re-establishing a semblance of stability and balance will take much more effort and political will — which will be tested by presidential election campaigns in the United States and Taiwan in the coming months. And while both sides say they want to reduce friction, their strategic assessments of the other have not budged.

“Under ordinary circumstances a visit to China by the [U.S.] Secretary of State would be an important visit and should have the effect of advancing bilateral relations,” said Shao Yuqun, a senior fellow with the center for American Studies at the Shanghai Institute for International Studies, a government think tank.

“But this visit, while still important, is hard to gauge in terms of how much it can advance relations. At a minimum, I think, it may keep things from getting worse, and if it can do that it would be a very good outcome. But I don’t know if it can make things better in bilateral ties. That’s still a question mark.”

Ties between the world’s No. 1 and No. 2 economies have sunk to their lowest…