China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi to meet US Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Washington this week
- The trip is ‘part of ongoing efforts to responsibly manage the US-China relationship and to maintain open channels of communication’
- Visit comes amid anticipation over whether Chinese President Xi Jinping will meet his US counterpart Joe Biden next month
The US State Department announced on Monday that Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi will travel to Washington this week to meet with Secretary of State Antony Blinken to “maintain open channels of communication”.
Blinken and Wang “will discuss a range of bilateral, regional, and global issues as part of ongoing efforts to responsibly manage the US-China relationship and to maintain open channels of communication”, according to the US government announcement.
“The United States will continue to use diplomacy to advance US interests and values, address areas of difference, and make progress on shared transnational challenges,” it added.
Wang’s three-day US visit, starting Thursday, will be his first to the US since September 2022, and is meant to pave the path for a highly anticipated but still unconfirmed meeting between Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Joe Biden at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in San Francisco next month.
Biden last met Xi in November on the sidelines of the G20 leaders summit in Bali, Indonesia. The meeting had signaled a warming of fraying US-China relations before tensions again rose with incidents like the Chinese surveillance balloon discovered transiting across North America in January.
