Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi will visit Washington this week for high-level meetings, according to senior Biden administration officials, as the US and China continue a series of diplomatic engagements intended to manage tensions even as a new war in the Middle East shows the limits of potential cooperation.
Wang will be in Washington Oct. 26 to Oct. 28 and will meet with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, the officials said on a briefing call with reporters on Monday.
The US side is planning to raise the subject of the war, which began with the invasion of Israel by Hamas. The group, which designated a terrorist organization by the US and European Union, seized more than 200 hostages. Washington has strongly supported Israel, while China has called for a cease-fire. President Joe Biden said Monday that “we should have those hostages released, and then we can talk” about a cease-fire.
In addition, US officials will engage Wang over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and North Korea’s weapons program, the officials said.
They said the meeting was part of ongoing efforts to responsibly manage US-China relations and didn’t outline any clear deliverables from the visit. They also declined to say whether it would lay the groundwork for a meeting between Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping at a summit in San Francisco next month, adding only that Biden has said he hopes to see Xi in the near future.
The Biden team also wants to bring up what it called China’s dangerous and destabilizing activities in the South China Sea, the officials added, particularly around the Second Thomas Shoal, where a Chinese coast guard ship collided with a Philippines-contracted resupply boat early Sunday.
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Wang’s visit is the somewhat delayed result of an invitation issued to then-Foreign Minister Qin Gang in June, when Blinken traveled to Beijing as the most senior US official to visit the Chinese capital in five years.
In the interim, Qin — China’s former ambassador to Washington — was ousted after just seven months in his new role, one of several senior officials to vanish from public view without explanation. Then Wang, who had previously been foreign minister, returned to that role in addition to his higher-ranking position as director of the Chinese Communist Party’s foreign affairs commission.
Blinken last spoke with Wang on Oct. 14 when the top US diplomat was in Saudi Arabia on a whirlwind trip around the Middle East. At a time when US officials were worried about Iran urging others to strike Israel, Blinken urged Wang to use Chinese influence in the region to try and keep things under control.