WASHINGTON (AP) – U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken will travel to China this weekend as part of the Biden administration’s push to repair frayed ties between Washington and Beijing and keep open lines of communication, the State Department said Wednesday.
Blinken will be the highest-ranking US official to visit China since President Joe Biden took office. His visit had originally been planned for earlier this year, but was postponed indefinitely after the discovery and shooting down of what the US said was a Chinese spy balloon over the United States.
Since then, however, there have been lower-level engagements between the US and China despite continued hostility and recriminations over actions by both sides in the Taiwan Strait, the South China Sea, the denial of China to condemn Russia for its war against Ukraine and the accusations. from Washington that Beijing is trying to increase its global surveillance capabilities, including Cuba.
The State Department said Blinken had spoken with his Chinese counterpart, Foreign Minister Qin Gang, on Tuesday night to confirm his trip, which will begin on Sunday, was first reported by The Associated Press and other news organizations last week. Blinken will leave Washington Friday night.
“While in Beijing, Secretary Blinken will meet with senior PRC officials where he will discuss the importance of maintaining open lines of communication to responsibly manage the US-PRC relationship,” the department said, using the acronym for the Republic People of China. “It will also raise bilateral issues of concern, global and regional issues and possible cooperation on shared transnational challenges.”
In a readout of the phone call, China’s foreign ministry said Qin urged the United States to respect “China’s core concerns,” such as the issue of Taiwan’s self-rule, “let to interfere in China’s internal affairs and stop harming China’s sovereignty, security and safety.” development interests in the name of competition”.
Qin noted that China-US relations have “encountered new difficulties and challenges” since the beginning of the year, and it is the responsibility of both sides to work together to properly manage differences, promote exchanges and cooperation and stabilize relations, he said.
Blinken, who will be the first secretary of state to visit China since 2018, is expected to meet with Qin on Sunday, as well as China’s top diplomat Wang Yi and possibly Chinese President Xi Jinping on Monday, according to American officials.
The trip will take place amid a host of complications in US-China relations, which have steadily declined in recent years since the Trump administration began with trade and industrial espionage.
These concerns quickly grew to include human rights concerns about the treatment of Uyghur Muslims and other minorities in the western region of Xinjiang, Hong Kong and Tibet, and increasing Chinese aggression toward Taiwan, and then questions about the origin of COVID-19 increased. virus
Blinken’s visit was agreed between Xi and Biden last year at a meeting in Bali during which the leaders agreed that the world’s two largest economies should stay in touch and take precautions to ensure there is no there are miscalculations in their global rivalry that could lead to conflict. The trip came a day after it was scheduled to take place in February, but was delayed after the spy balloon incident. Beijing insists the craft was a weather balloon that went off course.
Subsequent contacts have taken place but have been rare as tensions have risen over China’s conduct in the South China Sea, aggressive actions toward Taiwan and support for Russia’s war against Ukraine. Earlier this month, China’s defense minister rejected a request from US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin for a meeting on the sidelines of a security symposium in Singapore.
However, shortly after postponing his trip to Beijing, Blinken met briefly with Wang at the Munich Security Conference in Germany. And, CIA chief William Burns traveled to China in May, while China’s commerce minister traveled to the US last month. And Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, met with Wang in Vienna in early May.
Most recently, the top US diplomat for the Asia-Pacific region, Daniel Kritenbrink, traveled to China last week along with a senior National Security Council official to finalize the details of Blinken’s trip.
However, in recent days, the Biden administration has said it has scaled back Chinese efforts to bolster its intelligence-gathering and military capabilities around the world, including Cuba.
Blinken said Monday that when Biden took office in January 2021, US intelligence agencies briefed him “on a number of sensitive efforts by Beijing around the world to expand its logistics in the foreign and their collection infrastructure abroad to enable them to project and maintain military power at a greater distance level”.
“They were considering a number of locations around the world for this expansion, including intelligence gathering facilities in Cuba,” he said.
Although the Chinese had already upgraded their facilities in Cuba in 2019, Blinken said Biden determined more needed to be done because Trump administration officials “were not making enough progress on this issue and we needed a more direct approach.”
He did not elaborate on what had been done since then, although the Biden administration has moved quickly to expand its diplomatic presence, particularly in the Indian Ocean and Pacific island nations, where it has opened or plans to open at least five new embassies over the next year or so.
“We’ve been executing this approach quietly, carefully, but in our judgment, with results,” Blinken said. “We have engaged governments that are considering hosting PRC bases at high levels. We have exchanged information with them. Our experts assess that our diplomatic efforts slowed this PRC effort.”
After his meetings in Beijing, Blinken will travel to London to attend a conference on the reconstruction of Ukraine on June 21, the State Department said.
