The US government and western media talk of modest progress while China remains tight-lipped after a three-day visit by the treasury secretary. finews.asia takes a look.
It is hard to unequivocally pinpoint where China-US relations are. One day an unexpectedly positive comment by a senior government official and they are up. Then, some geopolitical snafu, like the balloon incident, and everything is back to square one.
So having something some kind of result that falls in between both extremes, such as the three-day visit by US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, might be the soothing balsam everyone needs right now.
At least that is how the Asian financial markets appeared to be digesting her trip to the mainland on Monday.
Highly Choreographed
As finews.asia wrote last week, the Treasury broadly trumpeted her visit in advance, inclusive of a pre-meeting meeting with the Chinese ambassador to the US, Xie Feng, in Washington.
The media news cycle was fed throughout the weekend. On 7 July, the Treasury released remarks from a roundtable discussion with US businesses operating on the mainland.
That was followed by a summary of Yellen's speech given during a meeting with Premier Li Qiang. After that, they published comments made at a climate finance roundtable, a lunch with female economists and entrepreneurs in China, a meeting with Vice Premier He Lifeng, and then the People’s Bank of China head Pan Gongsheng.
Heavy Coverage
It was all topped up by a final media conference.
Overall, the transparency is commendable, and instructive for many other governments.
It was probably why the visit was covered so heavily by western media (collated Google search results) and seen as being mostly positive, apart from a few stories here and there about the ostensible patriotism – or not – of the entrepreneurs who had met Yellen («Bloomberg», paywall).
No Coverage
The same could not be said for «Xinhua», the official state news agency. The English service did not mention her visit, or at least it has not done so yet.
In fact, the Xinhua search engine shows that the last story that ran about her was in May when she discussed a potential US default ahead of the congressional vote to increase the government debt limit.
That is a sharp contrast to the visit a month ago by US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, which was extensively covered by the news agency.
Hard to Decipher
Does it all mean anything? At this point, it is hard to tell.
In the financial markets, we should probably simply be grateful for the moderated tones and the fact that none of the meetings seemed to go off the rails at any point.
