The United States confirmed Sunday (July 2) that Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen will visit Beijing this week. The visit has been scheduled amid escalating tensions between US and China as relations continue to deteriorate since earlier this year. However, both nations say they are focused on mending ties as Yellen would become the second member of Joe Biden’s cabinet to visit Beijing in recent weeks.
The Treasury Department said in a statement that the trip is scheduled for July 6-9 and the secretary is expected to raise with her counterparts the importance for both countries “to responsibly manage our relationship, communicate directly about areas of concern, and work together to address global challenges”.
Last month, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was in Beijing on an official trip and met with China’s top leader President Xi Jinping and Foreign Minister Qin Gang.
Blinken’s trip materialised months after his to China was cancelled in the aftermath of the Chinese “spy” balloon saga. He was the highest-ranking US official to visit the Chinese capital in nearly five years.
The Chinese leader even said that he saw positives and headway in the strained relationship between Washington and Beijing. But again a diplomatic spat began when US President Biden referred to Xi as a “dictator”.
There was a rebuttal from the Chinese side as the foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said that Biden’s “extremely absurd” comments “seriously violated China’s political dignity” and caused “political provocation”.
Now, the US would expect some advancement in the ties from Yellen’s official visit. AFP reported quoting a senior Treasury official, who said on Sunday that Yellen will discuss how the US views its economic relationship with China. She will meet with senior Chinese officials and leading US firms, the spokesperson said without giving specifics.
According to the officials the US seeks to secure its national security interests and protect human rights, and the actions to this effect are “not intended to gain economic advantage over China”.
the American official further noted that Washington also looks towards “healthy” ties with Beijing and does not seek to decouple the economies, while pursuing cooperation on urgent challenges like climate change and debt distress.
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Should US expect a lot from this trip?
The Treasury official added that the US does not expect a “significant breakthrough” from this initial trip, but it does aim to build longer-term channels of communication with China.
Edward Alden, who is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) told AFP, speaking on the Treasury secretary’s intentions to visit China that “I think the US government is clearly trying to put some floor under the deterioration of the economic relationship”.
A Yellen trip could “restart a steady pattern of engagement at lower levels,” he said, adding that the US has shifted from being ambiguous about how far it was supporting decoupling to explicitly adopting a strategy of “derisking” instead.
This means “focusing on a narrower range of items that have strategic importance, trying to build fences around those items, but otherwise trying to continue to nurture a reasonably robust US-China economic relationship,” Alden added.
(With inputs from agencies)
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