Another Washington, D.C.-based diplomat with knowledge of the talks said Blinken had requested a meeting but “had no response from China” as he boarded his flight for Munich on Thursday.
Bloomberg first reported on Monday that Blinken was considering meeting with Wang at the conference, which opened Friday and continues through Sunday.
But there are signs that Blinken is operating under the assumption that a Munich meeting with Wang Yi is highly likely. “Some of the officials who would need to be there for such a meeting left with Blinken to Munich in anticipation of a potential meeting,” said a third Washington, D.C.-based diplomat familiar with the trip’s participants. All three diplomats spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to give public statements about the negotiations.
Neither the State Department nor the Chinese embassy in Washington, D.C., responded to a request for comment.
The meeting would be the first face-to-face attempt by the Biden administration to address the Chinese spy balloon the U.S. shot down off the coast of South Carolina a week ago.
The potential meeting carries political risk for President Joe Biden, who is trying to balance his administration’s desire to maintain “open lines of communication” with Beijing amid a widening bipartisan uproar about what both a House and a Senate resolution have declared was a “brazen violation” of U.S. sovereignty.
Already tense relations have only been souring since the Pentagon revealed the balloon’s presence over the northwestern U.S. earlier this month. Blinken postponed his originally planned Feb. 5-6 trip to Beijing in response to the incursion. Biden said on Thursday that he’d make “no apologies” for the balloon’s destruction and that he’d be speaking to Chinese leader Xi Jinping to “get to the bottom” of the incident.
The Chinese government has insisted the balloon was a civilian airship for meteorological purposes and has criticized its destruction as “a trigger-happy overreaction.” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin signaled a softening in Beijing’s position called on Thursday by calling for bilateral ties to shift to “the track of sound and steady development.”
