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Exclusive | US Secretary of State Antony Blinken hoping to visit China ‘in the near future’, close adviser says
- Trip to China would come as US looks for ways to ‘depressurise’ ties with China following the spy balloon row
- Derek Chollet brushes off reports of daylight between EU and US on China policy, saying the partners have ‘never been more closely aligned’
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Finbarr Berminghamin Stockholm
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is hoping to visit China “in the near future”, as Washington looks to “depressurise” its relationship with Beijing, according to one of his top advisers.
The superpower relationship has sunk to its lowest point in decades in recent months. Face-to-face diplomacy was frozen after Blinken cancelled a trip to China in February, following a row over an alleged Chinese spy balloon flying over the United States.
The broad contours of a visit were discussed between China’s top diplomat Wang Yi and US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan in Vienna this week, State Department counsellor Derek Chollet told the South China Morning Post in an interview in Stockholm on Saturday morning.
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“We would very much like to get back to where we were in the planning in February, prior to the surveillance balloon flying over the United States, where Secretary Blinken would go to Beijing on behalf of the president to pick up where the two presidents left off in their meeting in Bali late last year,” Chollet said.
“They talked about what we’re hoping to get out of such a visit and the structure of dialogue we’d like to have with the PRC [People’s Republic of China], particularly in the service of figuring out ways we could depressurise the situation.”
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He also said that while the US has “been willing to have face-to-face contacts”, China was “reluctant to do so”.
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