The United States has confirmed that top diplomat Antony Blinken will visit China this week, a long-anticipated trip that had been postponed in February amid increasingly fraught tension between the two superpowers.
Blinken will become the highest-ranking Biden administration to visit China on a trip that spans June 16 to 21 and will also include a visit to London, the Department of State said on Wednesday.
In Beijing, Binken will meet senior Chinese officials to discuss the “importance of maintaining open lines of communication” between the US and China, the statement said. It did not specify which officials.
The top US diplomat “will also raise bilateral issues of concern, global and regional matters, and potential cooperation on shared transnational challenges”, the brief statement said.
US officials were quick to lower expectations.
“We’re not going to Beijing with the intent of having some sort of breakthrough or transformation in the way that we deal with one another,” Daniel Kritenbrink, the Department of State’s top diplomat for East Asia, told reporters in a briefing call Wednesday.
