US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen is to travel to Beijing on Thursday as part of an ongoing effort to thaw US-China relations, a senior Us Department of the Treasury official said on Sunday.
Yellen, who has called the notion of an economic decoupling from China “disastrous,” has frequently said in the past year that she would like to visit China.
She says the two nations “can and need to find a way to live together” in spite of their strained relations over geopolitics and economic development.
Photo: Reuters
Yellen is to meet with Chinese officials and US companies doing business in China, and would stay until Sunday, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss details of the trip.
The goal of her visit is to deepen and increase the frequency of communication between the US and China, the official said.
While there are clear areas of common interest where Yellen can make progress, the official said, there are also significant disagreements that would not be resolved in a single trip.
The most recent flare-up came when US President Joe Biden referred to Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) as a “dictator” during a campaign fundraiser last month.
China protested loudly, but Biden later said his blunt statements regarding China are “just not something I’m going to change very much.”
The US president’s statements came after tensions over a Chinese surveillance balloon that the US government shot down, US-led restrictions on China’s access to advanced semiconductors and ongoing tensions about Taiwan.
Yellen’s trip would follow US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s two-day stop in Beijing last month, the highest-level meetings in China in the past five years. Blinken met with Xi and the two agreed to stabilize deteriorated US-China ties, but better communications between their militaries could not be agreed upon.
US treasury officials did not specify which officials Yellen would meet, but said it would not be Xi.
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