Asked in Monday’s press briefing if President Xi Jinping’s trip to the United States is still on China’s agenda, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lin Jian reiterated China’s interest in the Presidents of the two countries meeting.
“Head-of-state diplomacy plays an irreplaceable role in providing strategic guidance to bilateral relations. China and the U.S. are in communication regarding interactions between the two heads of state within the year,” he replied.
As to whether Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Ma Zhaoxu will visit the U.S. this week, as reported by the South China Morning Post, Lin merely said he had “no information to offer at the moment.”
Likewise, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters July 19, as he headed off for this week’s ASEAN meetings in the Philippines, that discussions with Chinese teams on the details of the Xi visit—anticipated to happen in September—continue, despite President Trump’s (wild, unsubstantiated) charges in his July 16 national TV broadcast that China had engaged in massive election fraud in the 2020 elections.
“I have no reason to believe that they won’t be coming,” he added. “It’s important. When you have two big, powerful countries like the United States and China, there are always going to be irritants, there are always going to be things we don’t agree on, but I think it’s incumbent on powerful and important countries like ours to continue to talk and have a relationship.”
When asked, Rubio also said that no meetings on the sidelines of the ASEAN-Plus meeting had been finalized with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi or Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, but he was “open” to meeting them.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters the next day that Russia would welcome such contacts between the U.S. and Russian Foreign Ministers. As of now, while there are contacts between the two Foreign Ministries, they only pertain to “rather technical” matters, Peskov reported. He added: “If there is contact at the level of foreign ministers, we will only welcome it.”
