The News
Beijing and Washington traded three prisoners apiece while the US lowered its travel advisory for China, rare positive news involving the superpower rivals.
The trio of Americans held by Beijing were detained on drug and espionage charges, but Washington argued they were wrongfully imprisoned. No details were released on the Chinese nationals being freed.
The US State Department, meanwhile, removed a “D” notice — used to indicate the risk of wrongful detention — from its travel advisory on China, and a spokesperson told The Hill that no Americans fit that designation in China any longer.
SIGNALS
Trump’s ‘house of hawks’ set to steer incoming administration
The deal suggests some thawing of relations between the US and China in the final days of the Biden administration. But incoming US President Donald Trump’s pick of Alex Wong for the role of deputy national security adviser — described as the latest addition to the “house of hawks” by Politico — signals a potential upcoming shift in China policy. However, although Wong shares a perception of China as a serious national security threat, he has backed working with other countries over a more unilateralist approach: We could therefore see a “division of labour, where Alex Wong works with allies to get them on board with a highly confrontational policy that [Mike] Waltz and [Marco] Rubio are shaping,” an East Asia expert told the outlet.
China may be the beneficiary of hostile relations
Trump’s short-term objective will be to consolidate US power vis à vis China, with scant regard for the idea of some “higher” global interest, an analyst wrote for the London School of Economics: Still, Chinese leader Xi Jinping may exploit that by laying traps that “gift [Trump] the impression of immediate victories, at the expense of structural advantage,” she added. The US is already starting to suffer the “unintended consequences” of its hostility toward Beijing, such as the exodus of Chinese scientists, and sanctions and export initiatives may have backfired as Chinese companies — and the state — become more resilient, a China expert argued in Project Syndicate.