Washington.- The US Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen, begins her trip to China this Thursday, a four-day tour in which he hopes to build bridges so that between the two powers there are some c responsible with the world situation.
Yellen’s trip takes place two weeks after the US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, traveled to Beijing and is yet another attempt to reduce tension between the two powers, explained the Treasury Department itself in a recent release.
This past Monday, Yellen met with the Chinese ambassador in Washington, Xie Feng, with whom she had a “frank and productive discussion” about the “efforts” to “keep the lines of communication open and responsibly manage the bilateral relationship.” between the two countries.
The US official conveyed to her the importance of the two economies largest in the world to work together “on global challenges” and macroeconomic and financial problems.
Yellen’s trip to Beijing will take place between July 6 and 9 and includes meetings with high-ranking Chinese government officials.
The Treasury Department did not detail the topics on which the meetings that Yellen will hold will be discussed, but given the situation it is very likely that microchips are one of them.
Although there has been no official confirmation, the Wall Street Journal published For a few days now, the United States has been considering new restrictions on exports of artificial intelligence chips to China.
As a counterpart, this Monday the Ministry of Commerce and the General Administration of Customs of China announced that as of August 1, it will not be possible to export gallium or germanium metal or more than a dozen of their derivatives without specific permission from the authorities to “protect national security”.
China is the world’s largest producer of both elements, materials that are key to the manufacture of semiconductors and the decision, the official Global Times newspaper warned in an editorial, is a “warning” for the United States and its allies.
With the aim of reducing its dependence on the Asian giant, the Government of Joe Biden enacted the Chip Law last year, which provides for allocate more than 50,000 million dollars to revitalize the national semiconductor industry with aid and loans for companies.
This is Yellen’s first visit to China as Treasury Secretary. In a message published last April, the secretary described the economic priorities of this relationship: ensuring national security interests, promoting mutually beneficial growth and cooperating on global challenges such as the climate crisis and the debt overhang.
The trip is part of the efforts of the Government of Joe Biden to improve communication with the Chinese Executive and prevent the competition between the two countries from leading to an open conflict, as happened in the previous Administration.
China and the United States lived through a time of great tensions during the Government of Donald Trump (2017-2021), when both nations got involved in a trade war with the mutual imposition of economic tariffs.
There was, however, a rapprochement when Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping met in November 2022 on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Bali.
However, relations were damaged again after the Biden government shot down an alleged balloon Chinese “spy” that flew over the United States at the end of January and fell over Atlantic waters on February 4.
That incident caused Blinken to suspend a trip he was planning at the time to China, which he finally ended up taking two weeks ago, after the Biden government expressed its desire that relations improve soon.
Biden himself said on June 22 that he hopes to meet Xi in the “near future”, although no date has been released for now.
