Blinken wants to visit China, State Department says

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken wants to visit China, the State Department said Monday, after the top American diplomat canceled his trip earlier this year over Beijing’s spy balloons.

He intends to go “when the conditions allow,” State Department Deputy Spokesman Vedant Patel told reporters.

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The comments come after the US ambassador to China met with Beijing’s foreign minister. “We discussed challenges in the US-China relationship and the necessity of stabilizing ties and expanding high-level communication,” Burns said in a tweet.

China has repeatedly rebuffed Washington’s requests for calls between top officials since the US scrapped Blinken’s travel plans in February.

Blinken was going to meet his counterpart as well as Xi Jinping and would have been the first secretary of state to visit China since 2018.

But the Pentagon revealed that the Chinese spy balloon had been detected after it travelled across the entire continental United States. Beijing claimed it was an “airship” being used for meteorological and other scientific research.”

On Monday, Patel, the State Department official, said the US hoped for open lines communication with China to remain. “Maintaining open lines of communication with the PRC has been a key tenet of our approach as it relates to this very complicated bilateral relationship.”

Read more: Blinken scraps China trip, US says spy balloon ‘unacceptable’