US-China talks come at time of heightened tension

US diplomatic trip comes 50 years after Henry Kissinger’s secret China visit that initiated relations between the two countries.

On Sunday, Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman – the US’s second-highest-ranking diplomat – will meet with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Tianjin, China in what looks set to be tense talks dominated by friction on a number of fronts. Last Monday, US President Joe Biden – along with NATO, the European Union, Australia, the UK, Canada, Japan and New Zealand – slammed China for a wide-reaching cyberespionage campaign, which Secretary of State Antony Blinken said posed “a major threat to our economic and national security”. The US Department of Justice also charged four Chinese nationals working with China’s Ministry of State Security with a campaign to hack into the computer systems of dozens of companies, universities and government entities in the United States and abroad between 2011 and 2018.