Global Courant
WASHINGTON — Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen will travel to Beijing on Thursday as part of an ongoing effort by the Biden administration to thaw U.S.-China relations, a senior Treasury official said on Sunday.
Yellen, who called the idea of economic decoupling from China “disastrous,” has said many times over the past year that she would like to visit China. She says the two nations “can and must find a way to live together” despite their strained relations over geopolitics and economic development. Yellen will meet with Chinese officials this week, U.S. companies doing business in China and with Chinese people and will stay until July 9, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss details of the trip.
The purpose of her visit is to deepen and increase communication between the US and China, the official said. While there are clear areas of common interest where Yellen can move forward, the official said, there are also significant disagreements that cannot be resolved by a one-way ticket.
The most recent flare-up came after President Joe Biden called Chinese President Xi Jinping a “dictator” during a fundraiser earlier in June. The Chinese protested loudly, but Biden later said his blunt statements about China “just aren’t something I’m going to change very much.”
The US president’s statements come amid tensions over a Chinese surveillance balloon that the US government shot down, US-led restrictions on China’s access to advanced computer chips and ongoing tensions over Taiwan’s status and security. But in the Biden dictator’s comments at a fundraiser in California, the president told his audience, “Don’t worry” about China as the US has taken steps to compete with its financial and technological ambitions.
Yellen’s trip would follow Foreign Minister Antony Blinken’s two-day stop in Beijing in June, the highest-level meetings in China in the past five years. Blinken met with Xi and the two agreed to stabilize deteriorating ties between the US and China. However, no agreement could be reached on better communication between their armies. Finance officials did not specify which officials she would meet with, but said it would not be Xi.
The visit of the finance minister will focus more on stabilizing the global economy and challenging China’s support for Russia in its ongoing land invasion of Ukraine. China has developed an uneasy relationship with the Kremlin – it claims neutrality in the war but holds joint military exercises and frequent state visits with Russian officials.
Still, US officials hope that US-China relations will not deteriorate further.
Yellen met with her former Chinese counterpart, Vice Premier Liu He, in Switzerland in January and gave a major speech at Johns Hopkins University in April calling for “cooperation on the pressing global challenges of our times” between the two countries for global stability while supporting economic restrictions on China to further US national security interests.
New developments offer a glimpse of what could lead to a renewed relationship.
At a Paris summit on global finance last week, a deal was struck that restructured Zambia’s debt with its creditors, including China – Zambia’s largest creditor with $4.1 billion of a total debt of $6.3 billion. The deal could provide a roadmap for how China will approach restructuring deals with other debt-stressed countries, and demonstrates the Asian powerhouse’s willingness to cooperate in negotiations with other Group of 20 countries.
“I am pleased that the international community has come together to support Zambia in its time of need,” Yellen said in a statement last week.
However, there are plenty of other tensions that affect the superpowers’ relationship. The discovery of a Chinese surveillance balloon flying over sensitive areas of the US in February put a damper on her previous travel plans and further strained relations.
US lawmakers questioned TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew earlier this year over data security and the social media company’s ties to China, with some pushing for a ban on the app, which is popular among American youth.
And last October, the Biden administration imposed export controls to limit China’s access to advanced chips, which it says could be used to make weapons, violate human rights and improve the speed and accuracy of China’s military logistics.
Yellen’s trip also comes as Biden considers 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 improve its military prowess.
Yet trade is intertwining the economies of the US and China. And despite strong speeches about the need to rethink the relationship, Yellen said in her Johns Hopkins speech that “a complete separation of our economies would be disastrous for both countries. It would be destabilizing for the rest of the world. On the contrary, we know that the health of the Chinese and US economies are closely linked.”
China shipped more than $536 billion worth of goods to the US last year. In contrast, the US exported $154 billion worth of goods to China, according to the Census Bureau.
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Associated Press writer Colleen Long contributed to this report.
