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US Treasury secretary Janet Yellen will visit China this week, becoming the second Biden cabinet official to travel to Beijing as the countries boost efforts to stabilise their turbulent relationship.
Yellen will spend four days in Beijing for meetings with top Chinese officials and US business leaders, according to a senior Treasury official, who cautioned that the trip was unlikely to produce “significant breakthroughs”.
The Treasury secretary will arrive in Beijing on Thursday, China’s finance ministry confirmed. She is not expected to meet President Xi Jinping.
Her trip comes just weeks after secretary of state Antony Blinken visited China with the hope of resurrecting efforts to set a “floor” under the relationship, which remains in its worst state since the countries established diplomatic ties in 1979.
The trips by Yellen and Blinken follow an agreement reached between Joe Biden and Xi in Bali in November that was derailed after a suspected Chinese spy balloon flew over the US early this year.
“Through this trip, we seek to deepen and increase the frequency of communication between our countries moving forward and to stabilise the relationship to avoid miscommunication and expand collaboration where we can,” said the Treasury official.
They added that Yellen planned to discuss the three pillars of the US-China economic relationship that she outlined in a speech in April. Yellen said at the time that the US would secure its national security interests, including human rights, but was not using security tools to gain competitive economic advantage.
She added that Washington wanted a healthy economic relationship with China but would respond to its “unfair economic practices”, stressing that the US sought co-operation on global challenges such as