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Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen will travel to Beijing Thursday as part of an ongoing Biden administration effort to thaw U.S.-China relations, a senior Treasury official said Sunday.
Yellen, who has called the notion of an economic decoupling from China “disastrous,” has frequently said in the past year that she would like to visit China. She says the two nations “can and need to find a way to live together” in spite of their strained relations over geopolitics and economic development. Yellen will meet this week with Chinese officials, U.S. companies doing business in China and with Chinese people and will stay through July 9, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss details of the trip.
The goal of her visit is to deepen and increase the frequency of communication between U.S. and China, the official said. While there are clear areas of common interest where Yellen can make progress, the official said, there are also significant disagreements that will not be resolved through a single trip.
The most recent flareup came after President Joe Biden referred to Chinese President Xi Jinping as a “dictator” during a campaign fundraiser earlier in June. The Chinese protested loudly, but Biden later said his blunt statements regarding China are “just not something I’m going to change very much.”
The U.S. president’s statements have come after tensions over a Chinese surveillance balloon that the U.S. government shot down, U.S.-led restrictions on China’s access to advanced computer chips and ongoing tensions about the status and security of Taiwan. Yet in Biden’s dictator comments during a California fundraiser, the president told his audience “don’t worry” about China as the U.
