U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken hosted talks on Friday with a senior Chinese Communist Party (CCP) official who is widely expected to be tapped as Beijing’s next foreign minister, as tensions between the two countries loom ahead of Taiwan’s elections this weekend.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken hosted talks on Friday with a senior Chinese Communist Party (CCP) official who is widely expected to be tapped as Beijing’s next foreign minister, as tensions between the two countries loom ahead of Taiwan’s elections this weekend.

Blinken met with Liu Jianchao for closed-door meetings at the State Department on Friday, capping off a series of meetings between U.S. officials and their Chinese counterparts aimed at calming ties between the world’s two superpowers. Liu, who leads the CCP’s diplomatic wing, is among a small coterie of top trusted advisors to Chinese President Xi Jinping and is predicted to be China’s next foreign minister, current and former U.S. officials told Foreign Policy.

Blinken’s meeting with Liu follows another recent milestone in U.S.-China ties: U.S. and Chinese military officials met at the Pentagon this week to hold their first formal dialogue in more than two years. Current and former officials also say U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, are expected to meet again in February or March to maintain a steady pace of dialogue between the two countries, though neither side has publicly announced whether or when such a meeting will take place.

The big question is how long this cooldown in the brewing new cold war between Washington and Beijing can last and whether routine dialogue between U.S. and Chinese officials will continue if a new crisis in the relationship erupts—from a forceful Chinese reaction to Taiwan’s upcoming elections to more military showdowns between China’s military and........

© Foreign Policy