The US State Department announced on Monday that Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi will travel to America this week to meet with Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Washington to “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.
Xi has limited his own travels, missing a meeting at the Brics conference this summer, and skipping the G20 meeting in New Delhi as well as the UN General Assembly in September.
Top US officials have made numerous trips to Beijing this year in a concerted effort to smooth relations. They include Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and climate envoy John Kerry.
Xi did meet with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, and other senators in a delegation, when they traveled to China this month – a meeting many observers felt was a positive signal concerning Xi’s possible attendance in San Francisco.
In their most recent face-to-face session, Blinken met Wang, who also serves as the foreign affairs chief of China’s ruling Communist Party – a position that outranks the foreign minister – in Jakarta in July, where the two sides said they held “candid and constructive” talks.
Calling Wang from Riyadh earlier this month, Blinken urged Beijing to use its influence in the Middle East to prevent other state or non-state actors from attacking Israel and widening its war with Hamas.