CIA Director Burns made secret trip to China: report

President Biden reportedly dispatched CIA Director Bill Burns to Beijing last month to meet with Chinese officials and emphasize Washington’s pursuit of maintaining open lines of communications in intelligence channels, the Financial Times reported. 

Burns’s trip to China demonstrates the influence the Chinese national security establishment is having on its internal, strategic policy deliberations, said Tong Zhao, a visiting research scholar at Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security. 

“The greatest Chinese concern today is deliberate U.S. effort to promote ‘color’ revolution, to threaten China’s internal stability, to undermine China’s regime security,” Zhao said, referring to public warnings issued by Chinese President Xi Jinping against popular, pro-democracy protests. 

“Chinese traditional thinking is that the U.S. security apparatus, the CIA and others, are doing, really, the dirty work. So I think it helps that Burns could directly try to reassure China that the U.S. doesn’t have that strategic intention. That type of reassurance from CIA leadership might be helpful.” 

The CIA director’s visit reportedly came ahead of Biden predicting a “thaw” in relations with Beijing at the Group of Seven summit in Japan in late May, downplaying the fallout from the discovery in February of a Chinese spy balloon over the U.S., calling the episode “silly.” 

The discovery of the balloon upended a planned trip by Secretary of State Antony Blinken to Beijing, which has yet to be rescheduled. Chinese officials, while largely stonewalling U.S. attempts at communication, have offered up small come openings for dialogue.

This includes a meeting between national security adviser Jake Sullivan and top Chinese Foreign Affairs official Wang Yi in Vienna in early May.

And while Chinese officials rejected an invitation by the U.S. to hold a meeting between Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Chinese Minister of National Defense Li Shangfu, the two met briefly on the sidelines of the Shangri-La Dialogue defense summit in Singapore Friday.

Sullivan, in a speech Friday to the Arms Control Association, reiterated calls for Beijing to answer Washington’s request for dialogue.

“We just say, we’re ready to talk when you’re ready to talk,” Sullivan said.