Washington:
US Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman will travel to China this weekend, the State Department announced Wednesday, creating her the highest-ranking official below President Joe Biden to pay a visit to amid deep tensions.
The pay a visit to is going ahead in spite of practically every day new rifts among the two powers such as on human rights and cybersecurity, indicating that each sides want at least to test the waters to see if diplomacy can bring more stability to a relationship frequently described as the most consequential to the world.
“These discussions are part of ongoing US efforts to hold candid exchanges with PRC officials to advance US interests and values and to responsibly manage the relationship,” a State Department statement stated, referring to the People’s Republic of China.
“The deputy secretary will discuss areas where we have serious concerns about PRC actions, as well as areas where our interests align,” it stated.
The trip will nonetheless not have the trappings of a complete-fledged official pay a visit to. Sherman will not go to Beijing but alternatively invest two days beginning Sunday in Tianjin, the eastern port city.
The State Department stated she would meet senior officials in Tianjin such as Foreign Minister Wang Yi.
John Kerry, the former secretary of state turned US climate envoy, is the only other senior official from the Biden administration to pay a visit to China as the world’s two biggest emitters pledged to work with each other on the planetary crisis in spite of a host of variations.
Kerry did not hold talks in the capital either but rather met with his climate counterpart in Shanghai exactly where there had been handful of public sightings of the commonly media-friendly former senator.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national safety advisor, met in March in Alaska with Wang as nicely as leading official Yang Jiechi in a visibly tense meeting in which the Chinese side berated the United States in front of the cameras.
Suspense on trip
Since last week, the United States publicly accused Beijing of carrying out the huge hack in March of Microsoft Exchange and issued a enterprise advisory warning of dangers in Hong Kong. The US Senate voted to ban imports from the Xinjiang area due to allegations of forced labor.
On Tuesday, China denounced what it referred to as a “fabricated” campaign by the United States which rallied allies such as NATO for a joint condemnation of purported cyber attacks from the Asian energy.
Sherman is currently in Asia with a tour of Japan, South Korea and Mongolia. A State Department announcement of her travel last week raised eyebrows by not such as China, indicating the two sides had been continuing to negotiate no matter whether she really should pay a visit to — and eventually decided the trip would go ahead in spite of the most recent episodes.
Biden has largely kept the hawkish stance on China of his predecessor Donald Trump, with US policymakers across party lines saying that an increasingly assertive China is the pre-eminent challenge for the United States.
But Biden has promised a more focused method of working with allies and has toned down the more vitriolic statements about China from late in Trump’s tenure.
The State Department also announced that Sherman would continue on to Oman.
While it stated she would focus on relations with Oman, the Gulf sultanate has been the crucial go-among for the United States and Iran, diplomacy in which Sherman was closely involved below former president Barack Obama.
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