August 14, 2024
HOUSTON – A group of senior officials from the administration of United States President Joe Biden departed on Monday for Shanghai for another round of high-level discussions with their Chinese counterparts, to keep the economic and trade relationship between China and the US going, according to US media.
They are expected to meet with Xuan Changneng, deputy head of the People’s Bank of China, and other senior Chinese officials, The New York Times and Bloomberg reported.
The US delegation is led by Brent Neiman, the US Treasury Department’s assistant secretary for international finance, and will include officials from the US Federal Reserve and the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
The talks are expected to take place on Thursday and Friday through the platform of the China-US Financial Working Group, with discussions planned on maintaining economic and financial stability.
Charles Foster, vice-chairman of the George H. W. Bush Foundation for US-China Relations, said he welcomed the new talks.
“It should be self-evident to both US and China leadership that dialogues between the US and China at a high level and under the auspices of the US-China Financial Working Group benefit the two countries with the largest economies in the world,” Foster told China Daily.
“Working successfully together in areas where both countries have mutual interests can only be confidence-building measures that may allow the US and China to work together to resolve our differences in other areas where there are significant differences between our two countries,” Foster said.
Neiman was quoted by US media as saying, “We intend for this financial working group meeting to include conversations on financial stability, issues related to cross-border data, lending and payments, private-sector efforts to advance transition finance, and concrete steps we can take to improve communication in the event of financial stress.”
The Financial Working Group was created last year, along with an Economic Working Group, and directly reports to Chinese Vice-Premier He Lifeng and US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. Four Financial Working Group meetings have previously been held, and the Shanghai meeting will be the second to be held in China.
Nicholas Tabor, deputy assistant secretary for international financial markets at the US Treasury Department, said at a symposium on the international financial system in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in June that the two countries had “begun to establish new channels for communication on financial policy” in 2023.
The US and China are the two largest economies in the world and together account for some 40 percent of global banking assets, and are home to 12 of the world’s 30 banks considered most important to the global system, Tabor said. “The domestic financial stability of the US and China has significant implications for global financial stability, and our policies have an outsized effect on how financial risks evolve globally,” he said at the symposium.
Tabor said the process of building new communication channels “has let Financial Working Group participants begin building the relationships necessary for a mutual understanding of policy, identify areas where cooperation can yield mutual benefits, and provide the space to communicate clearly about areas of disagreement.”