China’s top diplomat Yang Jiechi will hold talks with US national security adviser Jake Sullivan in Switzerland this week, according to sources familiar with details of the meeting, South China Morning Post reports.
The talks between the pair – said to most likely take place on Wednesday – will come less than a month after a telephone call between the two nations’ presidents, Xi Jinping and Joe Biden.
“It can be seen as a meeting in which the two sides attempt to rebuild communication channels and implement the consensus reached between the two leaders,” a person familiar with the arrangements said.
A second source said Yang was to leave China on Tuesday, and one item on the agenda was the possibility of a summit between Xi and Biden.
The meeting will also come just a day after US trade representative Katherine Tai formally laid out the White House’s China trade policy in a speech to Washington think tank the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.
In the long-awaited speech on Monday, Tai said China had failed to meet some of the commitments in the two nations’ phase one trade deal, and sounded pessimistic that the situation would change without a hard line.
Tai said she would seek a meeting with Chinese Vice-Premier Liu He in the coming days to review the phase one deal.
In their last phone call in September, Biden and Xi talked about managing the rising competition between their countries. The White House said the call was aimed at preventing competition between the two nations creating an unintended conflict, while Xi said the world would suffer from confrontation between China and the US.
Arranging an in-person summit between Xi and Biden to try to resolve some of the two rivals’ thorniest issues has been on the agenda for months in meetings between their officials. Beijing has previously said it was open to more dialogue, but that a leaders summit was unlikely before the end of the year.
