I heard the meeting between Xi and Kissinger was to discuss ways to mitigate the fallout of a pending war.
Kissinger as a realpolitik and Yellen as an economist are the US’s latest attempt at diplomacy after Blinken screwed up his visit. Notice that it’s the US sending people to China and not the other way around, that speaks volumes about the power positions these countries are in relative to each other.
Technically it was Biden who tanked whatever Blinken managed to accomplish during his visit when he made the statement calling Xi a dictator at a private event and then made sure the transcript was published on the official WH site. It’s pretty clear that Biden has no interest in having any sort of compromise with China. I get the impression that there are people in US admin who are getting worried and hence why we see people like Yellen and Kissinger rushing to China to try to smoothing things over. However, I just don’t see how China can possibly take any of that seriously at this point. US made their goals pretty clear and all of the tangible actions US has been taking clearly show that US is pushing for a conflict.
My impression is that China realizes what’s happening and they’re trying to push this conflict as far into the future as they can because the time is ultimately on their side.
It could be an example of them trying to pretend to be “diplomatic” so they can pretend to be the good guys when they cross China’s red line. But I think it is too soon to say.
They are probably just trying to keep “all options option” (except let China live in peace of course.) and this visit is just a part of that rather than specific long term plans to set up a war. They will use it in whatever way they can though.
Why would it be to mitigate. It was probably a gambit to move the state of play beyond what China would be willing to deal with, essentially a threat, some revelations that the US hoped would take China by surprise. Honestly, I don’t trust the framing of US buffoonery. They’ve demonstrated their ability and their willingness to do the worst things human beings can do. Kissinger was likely the harbinger attempting to get China to back down by speaking into existence the worst possible things we can imagine.