Blinken's New Year message rings hollow in light of his shackle-making meetings: China Daily editorial

Two weeks ago, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi that the United States and China have "overlapping interests" and while differences exist between them, the US is ready to manage and control them with China in a "responsible" manner.

One week ago, he extended festive wishes to the Chinese people and others celebrating the Lunar New Year.

Now, the top US diplomat is dedicating his first foreign visit in the Year of the Tiger to close ranks with the US' Indo-Pacific partners and others in the region to counter what the US alleges is China's "aggression and coercion".

Such Jekyll and Hyde behavior is the reason why the Chinese side insists that "seeing what one does is more important than listening to what one says" in its discourse on relations with the US.

The tight schedule of Blinken's trip — meeting the foreign ministers of Japan, Australia and India in Australia under the framework of Quad, a US-led anti-China clique, on Friday; meeting the leaders of 18 Pacific island countries via video links in Fiji a day later, during which he will no doubt warn them to beware falling into China's "debt trap"; and then meeting the foreign ministers of the Republic of Korea and Japan in Hawaii — exposes what the US administration means by handling differences in a "responsible" manner.

If his China-targeted divisive trip to Southeast Asia in December is taken into account, Blinken might be hard-pressed to say where the "overlapping interests" of the two countries he mentioned are.

Yes, climate change is a field in which the US administration seeks China's cooperation; and the Ukraine crisis is another. But aside from these, he would no doubt struggle to come up with any, since the US is apparently intent on leaving no stones unturned in its attempts to shrink the space for China's development by blocking the cooperation channels for China, be they industry, technology, investment or people-to-people exchanges.

That said, what the US wants to manage and control is by no means its differences with China, but China itself.

Blinken stressed to Wang two weeks ago that there has been no change in the US administration's position stated during the video meeting between the two heads of state in November, in which the US president emphasized the need for common sense guardrails to ensure that competition with China does not veer into conflict.

But what the US administration has been doing, and is continuing to do, judging by Blinken's current diplomatic blitz, unequivocally points to the fact that it is the US that gets to make the rules for what it deems a "free, open, and fair" international system, it is the US that defines what the common ground is with China, and ultimately that it is not guardrails but shackles that the US is trying to forge for China.