The media learned about the secret visit of the CIA director to China

CIA Director William Burns secretly paid a working visit to Beijing in May, reported AP, citing an unnamed US official.

“Director Burns traveled to Beijing last month, where he met with Chinese counterparts and stressed the importance of maintaining open lines of communication through intelligence channels,” he said.

As the agency notes, the trip of the head of the American intelligence was the first visit of such a high level to China after the incident with the Chinese balloon shot down in February 2023 over the territory of the United States, and is aimed at reducing tensions in relations between the two countries.

The Financial Times, noting the secrecy surrounding the visit, recallsthat Burns has repeatedly in the past on behalf of the White House made diplomatic visits abroad.

Earlier today, AP notes, US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin also had a “brief talk” with his Chinese counterpart, Li Shangfu, at a dinner to mark the opening of the Shangri-La Dialogue security forum in Singapore. As Vedomosti wrote earlier, the United States requested a meeting of the two ministers as part of the forum, but Beijing refused. The reason was that the administration of US President Joe Biden upheld US sanctions against Lee, imposed under Donald Trump due to the purchase of Russian weapons.

After the situation with the balloon on February 3, the State Department announced that the visit of US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken to Beijing, which was planned after negotiations in the fall of 2022 between Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Joe Biden, was postponed. However, then on February 18, Blinken and the head of the foreign affairs office of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, Wang Yi, met on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference.

Vedomosti previously wrote about the resumption of contacts between the US and China after a three-month pause. On May 10 and 11, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan met with Wang Yi in Vienna for more than eight hours in total. On May 25, the first meeting of cabinet members of the governments of the two countries in a long time took place in Washington – Minister of Commerce Gina Raimondo and Commerce Minister Wang Wentao discussed issues of trade relations and areas of potential cooperation.