China’s new ambassador to US arrives Tuesday

China’s new ambassador to the US, Xie Feng, will arrive in Washington as early as Tuesday to take up his post, two people familiar with his schedule who were granted anonymity because they were unauthorized to speak on the record told POLITICO on Monday, Report informs.

Xie previously served as vice foreign minister and is the successor to Qin Gang, who left Washington in January to become China’s foreign minister. While Xie is a career diplomat and specialist in US-China relations, he lacks Qin’s close ties to the Chinese senior leadership. His predecessor had a direct line to Chinese paramount leader Xi Jinping, a relationship that propelled him to foreign minister.

Xie arrives in Washington at a time when the US-China relationship has hit a 50-year low over tensions linked to trade, Taiwan and the Chinese spy balloon incident in February. Xi Jinping accused the US and other Western countries of “all-round containment, encirclement and suppression against us, bringing unprecedentedly severe challenges to our country’s development” in a speech in March. That rancor has effectively frozen high-level diplomatic engagement since President Joe Biden met with Xi in Bali, Indonesia, in November.

But Xie’s arrival suggests that Beijing might want to reduce that bilateral acrimony. And it follows a two-day meeting earlier this month in Vienna between national security adviser Jake Sullivan and China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, that the two sides described as “candid, substantive, and constructive.” Xie’s dispatch from Beijing comes on the heels of Biden’s prediction during a news conference Sunday at the end of the G-7 meeting in Hiroshima, Japan, that bilateral relations will “begin to thaw very shortly.”