Could it really spiral out of control? Increasingly militarized standoffs in the Pacific just part of the picture as Blinken became the highest-ranking US official to visit Beijing in five years. A trip pushed back at the start of the year when a Chinese spy balloon was shot out of the sky over US territory. Are the tensions about Taiwan or trade? Both, if you consider that more than half of the world’s semi-conductors are manufactured by Taipei and that Beijing remains the world’s factory.