White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan will travel to China next week to discuss an array of security issues.
Sullivan will meet with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, who also serves on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) politburo, during a trip to Beijing from Aug. 27 to 29, a senior administration official told reporters on Aug. 23.
The trip marks the first visit of a national security adviser to mainland China since 2016 and is part of a wider push by the Biden administration to prevent relations with China from spiraling into open conflict.
“Mr. Sullivan will raise U.S. concerns about China’s support for Russia’s defense industrial base, the South China Sea, and various other issues,” the official said.
“The purpose of this strategic level of communication is really to get into details on our strategic intent, intensive policy, how we see different situations.”
Planning for the trip began last November, on the sidelines of a high-profile meeting between President Joe Biden and CCP leader Xi Jinping in Woodside, California, the official said.
Sullivan and Wang are expected to focus on key areas of concern stemming from that meeting, including the flow of fentanyl precursors from China into the Americas, military-to-military communications, and Chinese communist aggression in the Indo-Pacific.
“China’s the source of the bulk of precursor chemicals flowing towards the United States and Mexico, and so being able to have those law enforcement-to-law enforcement conversations ... is critical as part of an approach to a transnational issue,” the official said.
The Biden administration also expects that the CCP will “engage in meaningful dialogue with Taipei,” as the United States tries to prevent China from engaging in an outright conquest of Taiwan, which the CCP claims is part of its territory.
The official described CCP attempts to intimidate Taiwan with military incursions around the island as “destabilizing,” saying that Beijing’s maneuvers “risk escalation” in the region.
“Our view is still that direct and meaningful dialogue between Taipei and Beijing is the only way to address these issues head-on,” the official said.
Although the meeting will be the fifth between Sullivan and Wang since May 2023, the official said the Biden administration is “clear-eyed” about the threat posed by China and “expect[s] that to be the case for the foreseeable future.”
“Our strategy is designed to meet that challenge,” the official said.
The official stated that the primary goal of the visit was to prevent the relationship from deteriorating into open conflict.
“We’re in a different point in the relationship than we were 10, 15 years ago, when we were talking outcomes and deliverables for engagements like this,” the official said.
“It really is about clearing up misperceptions and avoiding this competition from veering into conflict more than anything else.”
Sullivan and Wang’s latest meeting in January involved some preliminary discussions of conducting more military-to-military communications to prevent catastrophic miscommunication, countering the flow of narcotics manufactured with Chinese chemicals, and jointly discussing the safety ramifications of artificial intelligence.
Each time the two have met, they have typically spent about 10 to 12 hours discussing bilateral issues, the official said. That will likely be the case next week as well.
The official added that the talks “do not indicate a change in approach” to China and that the bilateral relationship remains “intensely competitive.”
“We are committed to managing this competition responsibly, however, and prevent it from veering into conflict,” the official said.
“We’ll continue to use these high-level engagements first to push forward for actual, concrete outcomes on the three areas the two leaders agreed to at the last summit.”
White House National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby also spoke to reporters about the trip on Friday, saying that discussions were also likely to include a wide array of international security issues, including those related to Burma, North Korea, Iran, and Russia, in addition to CCP aggression in the South China Sea and Taiwan Strait.
“I do want to stress that we do expect that Jake will want to talk to his Chinese counterpart about things that we have begun to work together on—the mil-to-mil communication channel, [and] fentanyl precursor preventative measures,” Kirby said.
“Chinese companies’ support [for] Russia’s war in Ukraine, tensions in the South China Sea, certainly with the Philippines, tensions across the Taiwan Strait—all of that will come up as well,” Kirby said.
