The White House has announced that National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan will travel to China to meet Foreign Minister Wang Yi, in a new bid to manage tensions months before the United States elections.
Sullivan will visit Beijing from August 27 to 29, marking the first visit by a US national security adviser since 2016. Nonetheless, other senior US officials, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, have visited over the past two years.
A senior US official told reporters on Friday that the trip did not indicate any softening of President Joe Biden’s approach to China and that his administration would continue to believe that “this is an intensely competitive relationship”.
“We are committed to making the investments, strengthening our alliances and taking the common step on tech and national security that we need to take,” the official noted, referring to sweeping restrictions on US technology transfers to China imposed under Biden.
“We are committed to managing this competition responsibly, however, and preventing it from veering into conflict.”
China-US relations have been turbulent in recent years. The two countries have sparred over their economic ambitions, and incidents like the US downing of a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon last year further inflamed tensions.
The visit of US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan in 2022, for instance, prompted a rebuke from Beijing, which considered her travel to be an endorsement of the island’s claims to sovereignty.
In April, Chinese President Xi Jinping told Secretary of State Blinken that the two superpowers “should be partners rather than rivals” and should help each other succeed rather than hurt each other, according to the Chinese state news agency Xinhua.
Blinken raised the issue of Chinese “support to the Russian defence industrial base”, and both the leaders agreed that Washington and Beijing still had issues to solve.
On Friday, the US official told reporters that Sullivan will reiterate concerns about China’s support for Russia, as the latter conducts a major expansion of its defence industry amid its invasion of Ukraine. Beijing has repeatedly said it does not directly give weapons to either side.
Moreover, Sullivan will also speak to Wang about North Korea and the Middle East, where China has criticised US support for Israel and Washington has urged China to rein in Iran.
Sullivan’s visit comes within months of the US’s general election in November, in which Vice President Kamala Harris is running to succeed Biden, the outgoing president.
If she wins, Harris is expected to continue to seek dialogue with China while also maintaining pressure. She addressed China briefly on Thursday in a speech accepting the Democratic Party’s nomination for the presidency.
“I will make sure that we lead the world into the future on space and artificial intelligence — that America, not China, wins the competition for the 21st century and that we strengthen, not abdicate, our global leadership,” she told the Democratic National Convention.
Meanwhile, her Republican rival Donald Trump at least rhetorically has pledged to pursue a harder line with China, with some of his aides seeing a far-reaching global showdown ahead.
