BEIJING: Jake Sullivan, President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, will visit China next week in a new bid to manage tensions months before US elections, the White House said Friday.
Sullivan will travel to Beijing from August 27 to 29 in the first visit by a US national security adviser to China since 2016, although other senior officials including Secretary of State Antony Blinken have visited over the past two years.
The visit comes months ahead of US elections in November in which Vice President Kamala Harris, running to succeed Biden, is expected to campaign on continuing to seek dialogue with China while also maintaining pressure.
Her rival Donald Trump at least rhetorically has vowed a harder line, with some of his aides seeing a far-reaching global showdown with China.
A senior administration official told reporters that the Biden administration’s engagement with China did not indicate any softening of approach and that it continued to believe that “this is an intensely competitive relationship.”
“We are committed to making the investments, strengthening our alliances, and taking the common step on tech and national security that we need to take,” she said, referring to sweeping restrictions on US technology transfers to China imposed under Biden.
“We are committed to managing this competition responsibly, however, and preventing it from veering into conflict,” she said.
The official did not indicate that the United States expected breakthroughs on the trip, in which Sullivan will meet with China’s foreign policy supremo Wang Yi.
The official said Sullivan will reiterate US concerns about China’s support for Russia in its major expansion of its defense industry since the Ukraine invasion. Beijing counters that, unlike the United States, it does not directly give weapons to either side.
Sullivan will also speak to Wang about North Korea and the Middle East, where China has criticized US support for Israel and the United States has sought to call Beijing’s bluff by urging it to use its relations to rein in Iran.
US official Sullivan to visit China next week: White House
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US official Sullivan to visit China next week: White House
- Sullivan and Yi are expected to lay the groundwork for a potential meeting with US President Joe Biden and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping
Four killed in Ukraine as Moscow and Kyiv exchange drone strikes
- Kyiv said Russian drone strikes had killed two people and wounded seven more in Kharkiv
- Synegubov said two people had been killed in the attack on the Shevchenkivsky district
KHARKIV, Ukraine: Russian and Ukrainian drone strikes killed at least four people Wednesday, officials said, as the war between the neighbors dragged on for more than four years with no diplomatic breakthrough in sight.
The latest attacks came with a third round of three-party talks derailed by the war in the Middle East, despite pressure from Washington on both sides to agree to an elusive peace deal.
Kyiv said Russian drone strikes had killed two people and wounded seven more in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv.
Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, which lies close to the Russian border, was encircled at the beginning of Russia’s invasion four years ago.
It has been attacked almost daily since Moscow’s forces were pushed back later in 2022.
The governor of the wider region, Oleg Synegubov, said two people had been killed in the attack on the Shevchenkivsky district.
“A civilian enterprise caught fire as a result of the enemy strike,” he said, adding that three women and four men had been hospitalized.
Another Russian drone wounded 20 people in the afternoon, after hitting a civilian minibus in the southeastern city of Kherson, Ukrainian prosecutors said.
In the Russian-occupied part of the southern Zaporizhzhia region, Moscow-installed authorities said two civilians had been killed in their car by a Ukrainian drone strike on the frontline town of Vasylivka.
“The danger of repeated strikes remains,” Kremlin-appointed governor Yevgeny Balitsky said.
