Antony Blinken is expected to meet Xi Jinping in Beijing, making him the first US secretary of state to meet with the Chinese leader in nearly six years and the first of President Joe Biden’s cabinet secretaries to visit China.
Several people familiar with the planning said the top US diplomat would meet Xi during his two-day visit which begins on Sunday. Blinken is visiting China after Biden and Xi agreed in Bali in November that they should find ways to stabilize turbulent US-China relations.
His visit marks a new phase of strengthened engagement between the two countries after a very difficult period which has been further complicated by the Covid-19 pandemic. US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen will visit China later this year. Yellen met Liu He, China’s top economic official, in Zurich last month.
“If President Xi Jinping decides to meet with Secretary Blinken, it will be another in a series of recent signals from the Chinese leader of a desire to change the tone, if not the substance, of U.S.-China relations,” Dennis said. Wilder, who was the White House’s top Asian adviser to George W Bush.
“President Xi, since ending his disastrous ‘zero-Covid’ policy, is clearly on a charm offensive designed, in part, to convince American companies not to move their supply chains out of China,” he said. Wilder said.
But Blinken’s trip to Beijing comes as relations between the two powers remain mired in their worst state since the United States and China established diplomatic relations in 1979. Tensions rose in August when China staged large-scale military exercises in response to US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. visit Taiwan.
Underscoring the tensions, a top Air Force general recently said the US and China would likely go to war with Taiwan in 2025, in a leaked memo that the Pentagon quickly dismissed as not reflecting not the view of the Biden administration. The memo highlighted growing concern in Washington about China. The Republican-led House of Representatives recently created a new committee that will focus exclusively on China.
Blinken is also expected to meet with Wang Yi, the top Chinese foreign policy official who recently replaced Yang Jiechi. He will also meet Qin Gang, China’s former ambassador to the United States and now foreign minister.
The trip comes nearly two years after Blinken and Yang engaged in a public spat at the start of a meeting in Alaska that was the first high-level engagement between the countries after Biden became president.
The State Department declined to comment. The Chinese Embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Blinken would be the first secretary of state to meet Xi in China since Rex Tillerson’s visit in 2017, the first year of the Trump administration. When Mike Pompeo, who succeeded Tillerson, visited China the following year, he did not have a meeting with Xi.
Blinken’s visit comes as countries remain at loggerheads over a range of issues, including China’s aggressive military activity around Taiwan, its refusal to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its rapidly expanding nuclear arsenal.
China is frustrated with moves by Biden to restrict its ability to obtain advanced American technologies, including semiconductors. The United States, Japan and the Netherlands recently reached an agreement to restrict the sale of chipmaking tools to China, while Washington and New Delhi this week launched several ambitious technology initiatives to counter the China.
Chinese ministers are expected to start visiting the United States later this year ahead of an Apec forum gathering in San Francisco in November. This event comes two months after a G20 summit in India that Biden and Xi are expected to attend.
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