In just two days this week, Elon Musk had more top-level Chinese meetings than Biden administration officials have had in months.
The Tesla and Twitter boss secured meetings with three government ministers as well as influential Shanghai Communist party chief Chen Jining. He reportedly even met vice-premier Ding Xuexiang, a confidant of President Xi Jinping.
His trip coincided with one by JPMorgan Chase chief executive Jamie Dimon, who also enjoyed access to high-profile government officials in Shanghai, where Chen called on him to attract more international financial institutions to China’s business capital.
Beijing has rolled out the red carpet for corporate leaders in an effort to win back their favour after three years of pandemic lockdowns that shut out international business. But the whirlwind of business contacts also underscored the breakdown in official communication between Washington and Beijing, as Sino-US relations languish at their lowest point in decades.
The return of corporate leaders to China was putting the country back on the “radar” of the business world, said Bala Ramasamy, professor at China Europe International Business School. But he added: “To what extent is this going to help the political side? I’m still a bit sceptical.”
The VIP reception for Musk, Dimon and others such as Apple’s Tim Cook, who visited in March, echoed an earlier period of US-China relations, when Beijing wooed American chief executives in an effort to influence policy in Washington.
But analysts cautioned that, while China remained a market US corporate chiefs could not ignore, their ability to ease geopolitical friction is limited. For US policymakers, security concerns over Xi’s assertive military stance and dominance of manufacturing supply chains trump business considerations.
“The traditional model of CEOs as credible conduits between the US and China is broken because security considerations now need to be woven into the commercial conversation,” said Han Lin, a professor at NYU Shanghai and country head of the Asia Group advisory firm.
During the pandemic, “people didn’t really talk to each other and that’s done a lot of damage”, said one finance figure present at an audience with Dimon.
China’s state media was keen to promote Musk’s trip to fuel optimism over the economic recovery, experts said. After seeing Qin Gang, China’s foreign minister in Beijing on Tuesday, Musk met Jin Zhuanglong, the industry minister and an aerospace expert and commerce minister Wang Wentao. He was also granted rare access to vice-premier Ding, who sits on the seven-member Politburo Standing Committee, Reuters reported.
Musk “gets a lot of attention”, said Ker Gibbs, former president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai. “It will be a shot in the arm for the Chinese populace, make people feel good for about 15 minutes.”
But the visit would not have “any substantive impact”, Gibbs added. “People are still really nervous about the economy.”
At a more strategic level, Beijing is trying to demonstrate that it is open for business, in defiance of what it says are US containment efforts through export controls on high-technology items such as semiconductors, analysts say.
In a statement after meeting Musk, foreign minister Qin struck a positive note, saying the US and China needed to brake in time to avoid “dangerous driving” and step on the “gas pedal’ to promote co-operation.
Musk responded that the countries were “intertwined” and that Tesla opposed “decoupling and breaking [supply] chains”, according to a government statement — comments that chimed with Beijing’s stance on western countries’ attempts to reduce industrial dependence on China.
While Musk sparked a domestic social media sensation, with the cameras following him to famed Peking duck restaurant 1949 — Duck de Chine, Dimon struck a lower profile, holding a closed-door conference for thousands of investors in Shanghai.
One attendee said the JPMorgan Chase chief endorsed the role of multinationals in mending US-China ties, saying that “engaging in conversation is good” and geopolitical discord could be resolved.
Another conference attendee said Dimon was “much more pensive in private meetings”, however, where he expressed “disappointment in the level of confidence here in China, worries about a slowdown of the economy and how they’re going to deal with that, worries about how they’re going to navigate the political situation with the United States”.
The atmosphere has shifted dramatically from past years, when one-time Wall Street bosses such as John Thornton, the former Goldman Sachs banker, Blackstone chief Stephen Schwarzman and former Treasury secretary Hank Paulson reputedly tried to act as go-betweens for the countries.
The US political climate was now so hawkish on China that it was “kind of terrifying”, Thornton told a forum in Shanghai in April. “It’s very hard to find senior Americans right now who have anything positive to say about China,” he said.
Beijing has also launched raids this year on the offices of US companies Bain, due diligence group Mintz and consultancy Capvision, sending a further chill through foreign corporations operating in the country.
There have been recent signs of dialogue between Washington and Beijing. Chinese commerce minister Wang met his US counterpart Gina Raimondo and US trade representative Katherine Tai last week, though Beijing rebuffed a meeting between its defence minister Li Shangfu, who is subject to US sanctions, and US defence secretary Lloyd Austin in Singapore this weekend.
If Beijing did want to use Musk as an envoy, he was an unlikely choice, analysts said. Musk is also “a controversial politicised” figure who may struggle to bend the ear of the Biden administration, according to Jorge Guajardo, a partner with Dentons Global Advisors in Washington and the former Mexican ambassador to China.
“My first thought was, ‘I’m not sure he’s the messenger that you want in Washington’,” Guajardo said.
Reporting by Joe Leahy in Beijing, Demetri Sevastopulo in Singapore, Thomas Hale in Shanghai, Edward White in Seoul, Kaye Wiggins and Andy Lin in Hong Kong and Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson in New York