Yellen heads to Beijing this week in move one expert calls an attempt to ‘put some floor’ under strained economic ties
US Treasury secretary Janet Yellen will visit Beijing this week, marking the second trip by a cabinet official to China since ties between the world’s top two economies deteriorated earlier this year.
Yellen is expected to discuss with her counterparts the importance for both countries “to responsibly manage our relationship, communicate directly about areas of concern, and work together to address global challenges”, said the Treasury Department in a statement on Sunday.
Yellen’s planned trip from 6-9 July comes just weeks after secretary of state Antony Blinken met President Xi Jinping and foreign minister Qin Gang in Beijing in June.
Blinken was the highest-ranking US official to visit the Chinese capital in nearly five years, and Xi said during the rare trip that he saw headway in the strained relationship between Washington and Beijing.
In Beijing, Yellen will discuss how the US views its economic relationship with China, a senior Treasury official said on Sunday. She will meet senior Chinese officials and leading US firms, the US spokesperson said without providing specifics.
While the US seeks to secure its national security interests and protect human rights, actions to this effect are “not intended to gain economic advantage over China”, the official added.
Washington also looks towards “healthy” ties with Beijing and does not seek to decouple the economies, while pursuing cooperation on urgent challenges like climate change and debt distress, the US official said.
The US does not expect “significant breakthrough” from this initial trip, but it does aim to build longer-term channels of communication with China, the Treasury official added.
Edward Alden, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) told AFP: “I think the US government is clearly trying to put some floor under the deterioration of the economic relationship.”
A Yellen trip could “restart a steady pattern of engagement at lower levels”, he said, adding that the US has shifted from being ambiguous about how far it was supporting decoupling to explicitly adopting a strategy of “derisking” instead.
On Beijing’s part, officials are “looking for concrete steps taken by the US to show that ‘decoupling’ and holding back China is not the ultimate goal of the United States,” said Wendy Cutler, vice-president at the Asia Society Policy Institute.
De-risking means “focusing on a narrower range of items that have strategic importance, trying to build fences around those items, but otherwise trying to continue to nurture a reasonably robust US-China economic relationship”, Alden said.
But observers do not expect a quick resolution to tensions.
President Joe Biden’s administration is considering a program to restrict certain US outbound investments involving sensitive technology with key national security implications – an issue that has riled Chinese officials.
Other possible sticking points include amendments to China’s anti-espionage law which recently broadened the definition of spying while banning the transfer of information relating to national security – a move that has spooked foreign and domestic businesses.
The senior Treasury official told reporters on Sunday that Washington intends to communicate its concerns about the law.
Source: The Guardian