WASHINGTON: US Secretary of State Antony Blinken will travel to China next week for long-delayed talks aimed at stabilising tense relations, and a US official said he is expected to be there on Jun 18.
Reuters reported on Wednesday (Jun 7) that Blinken would travel to China in the coming weeks, citing an official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
An official on Friday said Blinken would be in Beijing on Jun 18, but gave no other details.
In February, Washington’s top diplomat scrapped a planned trip to Beijing, which would have been the first by a US secretary of state in five years, over a suspected Chinese spy balloon that flew over the United States.
Washington has been keen to reschedule the trip, and the timing emerged after the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that China has reached a secret deal with Cuba to establish an electronic eavesdropping facility on the island roughly 160km from Florida.
The spokesperson for the White House National Security Council on Thursday said the report was not accurate, while saying that Washington has had “real concerns” about China’s relationship with Cuba and was closely monitoring it.
The State Department, White House and Pentagon did not, however, immediately respond to requests for comment on a subsequent New York Times report that said China was planning to build a facility in Cuba that US officials were concerned could be capable of spying on the United States by intercepting signals from nearby US military and commercial facilities.
In Havana on Thursday, Cuban Vice Foreign Minister Carlos Fernandez de Cossio dismissed the Journal report as “totally mendacious and unfounded,” calling it a US fabrication meant to justify Washington’s decades-old economic embargo against the island nation. He said Cuba rejects all foreign military presence in Latin America and the Caribbean.
China’s foreign ministry said on Friday that “spreading rumors and slander” was a common tactic of “hacker empire” the United States.
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