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China’s No 3 leader Li Zhanshu to visit Russia. Could a Xi-Putin meeting be next?
- The visit later in the week will make Li the most senior figure to travel outside China since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic
- Visit comes as Moscow faces growing pressure from the West following its invasion of Ukraine earlier this year
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The third-ranked leader in China’s political hierarchy will visit Russia this week in a sign that the country’s top officials are resuming international travel after a long, pandemic-induced hiatus.
Li Zhanshu, the head of the country’s legislature, will also visit Mongolia, Nepal and South Korea as part of his 11-day trip, which starts on Wednesday with the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok.
Li, who is expected to retire at the Communist Party’s national congress next month, will be the first member of the Politburo Standing Committee, the country’s top decision-making body, to leave China since January 2020.
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President Xi Jinping and other senior figures have not left the country since the start of the pandemic and China’s strict zero-Covid policy has cut travel in and out of the country to a bare minimum.
Among the 25 members of the wider Politburo, only Yang Jiechi, the party’s foreign policy chief, has travelled abroad since the start of the pandemic.
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Chinese troops in Russia as multinational military drills open in far east
Chinese troops in Russia as multinational military drills open in far east
Li is expected to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin during the four-day economic forum, possibly paving the way for a meeting between Xi and Putin the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, on September 15.
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