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Chinese president plans state visit to U.S. | |
(about 14 hours later) | |
BEIJING — Chinese President Xi Jinping will travel to the United States this year, his first state visit since taking over the ruling Communist Party in 2012. | |
No dates have been announced for the planned visit and both sides are discussing details of the trip, China’s ambassador to Washington told Chinese reporters. | |
The comments by Ambassador Cui Tiankai were reported Monday in the state-run China Daily. | |
On Friday, U.S. National Security Adviser Susan Rice said invitations this year also had been extended to the heads of U.S. allies Japan and South Korea as well as to Indonesia. | |
The visits are a strategic attempt to increase engagement in Asia — a region where U.S. interests have been increasingly drawn into competing territorial claims and worries about China’s rising military and economic power. | The visits are a strategic attempt to increase engagement in Asia — a region where U.S. interests have been increasingly drawn into competing territorial claims and worries about China’s rising military and economic power. |
There is no shortage of topics to work through, including cybersecurity, North Korea, Chinese relations with U.S. allies in Asia, and human rights. | |
The announcements come days after the unveiling of an updated national security strategy by President Obama, which touched on the complex and often thorny U.S.-China relationship. | |
“While there will be competition, we reject the inevitability of confrontation,” the document read. | “While there will be competition, we reject the inevitability of confrontation,” the document read. |
Xi last visited the United States in June 2013 — a purposely informal affair that occurred in California and did not include a stop in Washington. | |
He and Obama most recently met in November in Beijing after the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meetings. | He and Obama most recently met in November in Beijing after the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meetings. |
Xi’s most recent extended visit to the United States was in 2012, while he was vice president. That trip — occurring when Xi was still leader-in-waiting — was a well-staged diplomatic and public relations love offensive in many ways, in which Xi talked enthusiastically of his earlier visits to Iowa as a lowly official to study American agriculture. | |
This time, experts say, he will be returning to Washington in a much-changed position — as someone who has consolidated power more quickly and ruthlessly than most predecessors, and as a leader who has declared grand ambitions for his country and is eagerly pushing for China to be one of the world’s dominant powers for the 21st century. |
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