Blinken ends latest trip to China with visit to Beijing record store

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US Secretary of State Antony Blinken concluded his latest visit to China with a stop at a Beijing record store where he bought albums by Taylor Swift and Chinese rocker Dou Wei in a symbolic nod to cross-cultural exchanges he had been promoting for three days. Music, he said at the Li-Pi shop on his way to the airport late on Friday, “is the best connector, regardless of geography”. Advertisement Yet Swift’s Midnights and Dou Wei’s Black Dream could just as easily represent the seemingly intractable divisions in the deeply troubled relationship between the world’s two largest economies that both...