President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, will visit China next week, sources say, to meet with the country’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, as the United States works to keep the competition between the two countries from spilling into conflict.
Sullivan is expected to depart early in the week, a source tells CNN, for a multi-day visit in which he’s expected to meet with several top Chinese officials.
In recent years, Sullivan and Wang have structured meetings to take place regularly every six months to keep the lines of communication between the global superpowers open. The two officials last met in Zurich in January. Since then, the Biden administration announced it would maintain a set of sweeping import tariffs in place on Chinese goods — with significant increases on categories like semiconductors and electrical vehicles expected to be implemented soon.
Biden and Xi last met in person when San Francisco hosted the APEC Summit in November 2023. At that meeting, CNN previously reported, Xi promised Biden that Beijing would not interfere in the 2024 US election.
The meetings also come ahead of a series of high-profile multilateral summits that Biden will attend in the coming months and at which he will be face-to-face with Chinese President Xi Jinping, whom Biden has known for decades. Discussions for the two leaders to meet again are in their early stages, a US official tells CNN, and there is no certainty that an expanded bilateral meeting will take place in the twilight of Biden’s presidency.
Leaders of countries participating in the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, a bloc known as APEC, will gather in Peru in mid-November. Leaders from the Group of 20 nations will gather in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in the days after that.
Axios first reported on Sullivan’s planned visit.
