Janet Yellen to make second trip to China next month

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen will travel to China to meet with members of the country's senior leadership in April, two U.S. government officials familiar with the trip planning told POLITICO.

Yellen’s trip in the coming weeks will be a follow-up to her meetings in Beijing in July that resulted in the formation of new Economic and Financial Working Groups designed for “frank and substantive discussions” on contentious issues.

Yellen’s travel plan reflects the administration’s efforts to sustain a still-fragile stability in bilateral ties battered over the past year by issues including the Chinese spy balloon incident, rising tensions across the Taiwan Strait and Beijing’s increasingly aggressive posture in the South China Sea.

The administration has tried to cool that rancor in the past nine months with a series of visits by senior administration officials including Secretary of State Antony Blinken in June and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo in August. Those high-level in-person contacts aim to keep ties stable in the heat of a U.S. presidential election campaign in which a China threat narrative will loom large in rhetoric on foreign policy.

A Treasury spokesperson declined to comment. The Chinese embassy in Washington didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

The officials, who were unauthorized to speak on the record, did not share details of her travel itinerary and meeting agenda, but Yellen and other senior Treasury officials have in recent months laid broad hints in speeches and interviews of her China-related priorities this year.

Such face-to-face meetings with senior Chinese officials are essential to the administration’s efforts to “responsibly manage” bilateral ties, Yellen said in a speech in December. In that same speech Yellen said her China-related priorities in 2024 included greater transparency on Beijing’s “foreign exchange practices,” planning on joint management of any possible future global banking crisis and cooperation on anti-money laundering efforts.

The administration is also concerned that Beijing’s efforts to jumpstart its sputtering economy will spark a flood of low-priced exports that could destabilize global markets, Treasury’s Under Secretary of International Affairs, Jay Shambaugh, said last month.