How food and chopstick skills are helping ease US-China tensions
Al JazeeraWhat officials eat and how have become key ingredients in efforts to find common ground in a testy relationship. Shanghai, China – “The Chinese take great pride in their food,” read a memo prepared for United States President Richard Nixon ahead of his groundbreaking visit to the People’s Republic of China in 1972. Chinese public opinion of the US sharply deteriorated during the Donald Trump presidency, who famously ate “Americanised” Chinese food during his state visit in 2017, rebounding slightly since President Joe Biden took office. While Blinken also ate in authentic restaurants in Shanghai and Beijing, with the US embassy even sharing a clip of him with a popular Chinese food vlogger showing off his chopstick skills, his eating habits received far less attention than Yellen’s. Instead, it emphasised Chinese talking points about the US’s “wrong words and deeds” on various red-line issues at the centre of US-China tensions, including Taiwan, the South China Sea, and Ukraine.
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