Is China mellowing? If so, Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s upcoming visit there could lead to important changes in U.S.-China relations.

When necessary, China’s president Xi Jinping seems able to abandon even policies with which he has been closely identified. In 2016, he grandly proclaimed his Belt and Road Initiative to be “a project of the century,” but when loans to a rash of unworthy creditor nations went sour, the program was slashed from $75 billion per year to $4 billion in 2019. And in December he abruptly (perhaps much too abruptly) abandoned his cherished zero-Covid policy after extensive street protests against it.

In like manner, he may be in the process of shrugging off the bullying “wolf warrior” diplomacy of the last years which has been so massively counterproductive causing neighbors to arm and China’s unfavorability ratings around the globe to soar from 20% to 30% early in the century to 70% to 80% now.

Xi’s first face-to-face meeting with President Joe Biden late last year was remarkably cordial, his recent New Years speech dropped the demand in the last one for unification with Taiwan for more moderate language, and he has designated as foreign minister a man who seems willing to say nice things about (some aspects of) the United States while moving a notorious wolf warrior diplomat to bureaucratic oblivion.

None of this guarantees lasting change, but it is certainly suggestive and bears close watching, particularly as China deals with its distracting and perhaps extended Covid crisis. There is a potential for a sort of Nixon-goes-to-China development in which China, while making no real change to its domestic policy, decidedly shifts its foreign policy.