america nsa visits china before the presidential elections no talks with jinping on taiwan

The United States and China have agreed to expand military-to-military contacts and pledged to hold a second round of talks on artificial intelligence (AI) cooperation. These agreements were reached at two-day talks between US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and China’s top diplomat Wang Yi that ended on August 28 in Beijing. While the two sides disagreed on key issues, potential talks between US President Joe Biden and his counterpart Xi Jinping are likely to take place “in the coming weeks”. During the meeting, the two sides agreed to maintain high-level exchanges and pledged to cooperate in areas such as drug control, law enforcement, climate change and repatriation of illegal migrants, The Straits Times reported.

It is pertinent to note that Sullivan’s visit was the fourth of such strategic talks held between the two leaders since May 2023. The first time they met was in Vienna to lay the groundwork for the first of a series of top-level bilateral meetings that helped restore a certain measure of stability in bilateral relations. However, growing tensions between the two countries over a number of issues have hampered meaningful outcomes of such talks. This was his first visit to China as National Security Adviser aimed at stabilising bilateral ties to avoid conflict. During the visit, he also met with Wang Yi, China’s Foreign Minister and the ruling Communist Party’s top foreign policy official. He had a meeting on Thursday with General Zhang Youxia, one of the two vice presidents of the ‘Central Military Commission’, an organisation headed by Xi. It is not common for such a meeting to take place with an American official. The meeting comes at a time when both sides want to maintain relations on an equal footing before the US presidential change in January.

Zhang told Sullivan that your request to meet me shows how much importance you attach to military security and the relationship between our militaries. A statement issued by the White House after the talks between Sullivan and Zhang said that the two sides “recognized the progress in continuous and regular mutual military communication over the past 10 months and referred to the agreement announced on Wednesday for telephone talks between commanders in the near future.” China suspended communication between the two armies and in some other areas after then US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan in August 2022. Communication was gradually restored after Xi and Biden met outside San Francisco in November.