June 3, 2023 – 1:50 p.m
The Financial Times reported on Saturday, citing US government sources, that the director of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) paid a secret visit to China. According to sources in the London Business Daily, William Burns traveled to Beijing in May, where he held talks with Chinese government officials.
Speaking to the Financial Times, a US government official said: In his China meetings, Burns primarily emphasized the importance of keeping channels of communication open. The British newspaper, which quoted MTI, stated that a high-ranking official in the administration of US President Joe Biden visited China in the person of the CIA director.
Burns’ trip indicates how worried the White House is about the deterioration of relations between Beijing and Washington, the Financial Times commented. According to the newspaper’s sources, last year Biden assigned the director of the CIA to try to dissuade Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the US House of Representatives at the time, from visiting Taiwan.
Relations between China and the United States fell to a new low after Nancy Pelosi’s official visit to Taiwan, and China conducted large-scale military exercises near the island in response to the visit of the Speaker of the US House of Representatives.
At the same time, the Financial Times mentions in its article on Saturday that Joe Biden announced last month, at the Hiroshima summit of the Group of Seven major industrial powers (G7), that he expected an “immediate thaw” in bilateral relations. The US president did not mention the details, but the British newspaper confirms that the CIA director traveled to Beijing before Biden’s statement.
