U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken will travel to Beijing this weekend, the State Department announced Wednesday, as the U.S. confronts a spate of intensifying diplomatic challenges with China . His visit there will be the first by a Secretary of State since 2018, and the first by a cabinet-level official since 2019.
In a briefing call Wednesday, senior U.S. officials acknowledged that the meeting came at a “crucial time” in the relationship but downplayed expectations for major “deliverables.”
“Efforts to shape or reform China over several decades have failed, and we expect China to be around to be a major player on the world stage for the rest of our lifetimes,” deputy assistant to the President and Coordinator for the Indo-Pacific Kurt Campbell said. “As the competition continues, the PRC will take provocative steps — from the Taiwan Strait to Cuba — and we will push back. But intense competition requires intense diplomacy, if we’re going to manage tensions.”
The officials declined to detail the Secretary’s schedule while in Beijing, including whether he would meet with Chinese president Xi Jinping, but said diplomats on both sides had invested “many hours” preparing for meetings to “facilitate substantive dialogue in the days ahead.”
“In the course of those discussions, both sides have indicated a shared interest in making sure that we have communication channels open and that we do everything possible to reduce the risk of miscalculation,” Kritenbrink said.
The news of the Cuba facilities followed other provocative moves by China, including two military interactions that U.S. officials have decried as dangerous.
A Chinese warship carried out what the U.S. called an ” unsafe ” maneuver in the Taiwan Strait, cutting sharply across the path of an American destroyer. The U.S. also accused a Chinese fighter jet of performing an ” unnecessarily aggressive maneuver ” by flying directly in front of an American spy plane in late May over the South China Sea.
