The US Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, is in China, aiming to put relations between the countries on a steadier footing. Mr. Blinken has been in Shanghai, holding meetings with business leaders. He's now heading to Beijing for talks with the Foreign Minister, Wang Yi. Although tensions have eased since last year, disagreements on issues such as trade and security remain. I'm going to speak to our China correspondent, Stephen McDonald, who's in Beijing for us. There's been a cordial note to begin with, a bit of diplomacy over basketball, but there's a lot at stake, isn't there?

Yes, it's interesting. You say that tensions have eased since last year, and yet in the last seven days or so, it's like they've been ramping back up again. That's partly because Anthony Blinken, before he came here, accused China of being the major sponsor of Russia and its war in Ukraine. And of course, the government in Beijing responded very angrily to this. And so we might expect that when the US Secretary of State finally makes it to Beijing here for his talks with Wang Yi, his Chinese counterpart, and even possibly with Xi Jinping, we don't know that yet, that they'll be talking about these tense matters, possibly quite candidly. I mean, you'd like to be a fly on the wall to actually have a listen to that, actually.

Some of the issues, including support for Russia and Ukraine. Tell us about that and other hot topics on the agenda. Yes.

I mean, many hot topics. Wherever you turn, they've got stuff they don't agree with. And in fact, issues that bring quite a bit of tension. The US ban on TikTok. Us providing military support to Israel, US providing military support to Taiwan, China's providing support to Russia. I mean, then that's before even you We get to trade and all these questions of blocking microchips and other technologies which could be used in military applications. Now, that said, both sides are still trying to make quite some effort on this trip to also generate goodwill. Anthony Blinken went to a basketball game here. Apparently, a very close game. The Zhejiang pipped Shanghai by one point. Then when he met the Shanghai Communist Party chief, he mentioned, Oh, you were in the basketball last night. So that stuff brings about goodwill. And in the meeting between those two leaders, I could just give you a quick flavor of it. Chen Jin-ing, the Shanghai Party secretary, said that whether China and the US choose cooperation or confrontation, it will affect the well-being of both peoples, both nations, and also the future of humanity. And then Anthony Blinken responded, saying, We have an obligation to our people, an obligation to the world to manage the relationship between our countries.

Certainly, other world leaders will be looking to this meeting and looking to the relationship in general between China and the US to see if they can establish some stability, at least on the trade front, because the global economy, frankly, needs it.

Stephen McDonald, thank you very much indeed. We're going to speak now to Yuka Kumbayashi, a lecturer on China and international politics at Soas. Thank you very much indeed for being with us. How would you describe the current US-China relationship?

I think the US-China relationship is really at a tension point at the moment. You actually saw the bill over Senate of aid to Taiwan, which has actually been one of the source spots between US and China, given that US has a one China policy, and China sees Taiwan as inherently part of their sovereign state. Essentially, this is actually one of the key hot areas that will be really a discussion in the meeting tomorrow. I think this is actually looking more and more like a very tense Cold War-like scenario. If you look at the most recent Ministry of Foreign Affairs' statement on Blinken's visit from the Chinese government, you'll see that there are three main points that are raised in the statement, which is basically about perception, and conversation, and management of disagreements. You can see that it's going to be a very long, difficult meeting that Mr. Blinken has with one EU tomorrow.

How much of a problem is it on the economic side? There's, for example, the prospect of further tariffs on Chinese imports and restrictions on China's access to advanced semiconductors. How much of that will be part of the conversation this time around?

I think economy has been one of the key issues around US-China relations. You can see that back to the Trump administration when you had the US-China Trade War. But it's always been an issue, and you can see it again arisewith Blinken's visit in Shanghai when he met the businessman there in that sense of like they're emphasizing a level playing field and essentially having this fair trade with China. You can see that we're also seeing a point where we have economic security very high in the agenda for both sides in the sense of what we do with supply chain resilience. You're actually seeing a complex factor of one, ensuring smoother trade relations between the two, but one, we're actually seeing a very different regime shift in trade, where we actually see a very different scenario for what we saw when we were under globalization.

What about the issue of Ukraine? One of the aims appears to be to try and persuade China not to send the components to Russia that can then be used in the war in Ukraine. How likely are they to be able to discourage the Chinese from doing that?

It's a very difficult issue given that China and Russia are very solid in their relationship. Given that you see from the Chinese government about perception and misunderstanding overly repeated, you're going to have a very tough discussion around issues around Ukraine and trying to unpack this conflict relations, what you see with US and China, but you actually see Russia on the sidelines, given that you actually see this revival of a Cold War scenario. You can see this also in the statement that China released that it does raise issues like august. So lots of discussion about containment of China, lots of discussion around this Cold War-like language. It is a very tough conversation that we see ahead tomorrow, but I'm hopeful that both sides are talking about conversation, and both sides are talking about managing this important relationship.Yuka.

Kobayashi, thank you very much indeed for taking the time to talk to us.