US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen travels to Beijing to defuse tensions

2023-07-03 02:25:44

US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen will travel to Beijing on Thursday as part of an ongoing effort by the Biden administration to unfreeze US-China relations, a senior Treasury official announced on Sunday.

Relations between the two countries became tense after Washington ratified its support for Taiwan, which Beijing considers part of China, and have grown in recent days, when Joe Biden referred to Chinese President Xi Jinping as a “dictator “.

Calling China’s disengagement from the Western economy would be “disastrous,” Yellen said the two nations — the United States and China — “can and need to find a way to live together” despite their strained relations over geopolitics and the economic development.

Yellen believes that China’s disconnection from the Western economy would be “disastrous”

Yellen will meet this week with Chinese officials and US companies doing business in China, though she declined to provide details of her visit.

Although there are clear areas of common interest where Yellen can move forward, there are also important disagreements that will not be resolved in a single trip, this senior official has alerted, who has advanced the news.

Yellen’s trip follows Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s recent two-day trip to Beijing in June. These are the highest-level bilateral meetings held in the last five years. Blinken met with Xi and the two agreed to stabilize the deteriorating ties between the two countries.

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The Treasury secretary’s visit will focus more on stabilizing the global economy and challenging China’s support for Russia in its ongoing ground invasion of Ukraine. China has developed an uneasy closeness with the Kremlin, claiming neutrality in the war but conducting joint military exercises and frequent state visits with Russian officials.

Yellen met her former Chinese counterpart, Vice Premier Liu He, in January in Switzerland and delivered a speech at Johns Hopkins University in April calling for “cooperation on today’s urgent global challenges” between the two countries in the interest of maintaining overall stability.

Yellen’s trip also comes as Biden is considering issuing an executive order that would tighten rules on some foreign investments by US companies in an effort to limit China’s ability to acquire technologies that could enhance its military prowess.