OTTAWA (Reuters) – Canada’s Foreign Minister Melanie Joly will meet with her Chinese counterpart Wang Yi in Beijing on Friday for talks on bilateral relations and security issues, Ottawa said on Thursday.
Joly is making the trip to China, her first as foreign minister, at the invitation of Wang, the Canadian foreign ministry said in a statement.
The top diplomats will discuss global and regional security issues as well as “possible avenues for collaboration on common challenges,” the ministry said.
“As the world faces increasingly complex and intersecting global issues, Canada is committed to engaging pragmatically with a wide range of countries to advance our national interests and uphold our values,” Joly said in the statement.
Sino-Canadian relations turned icy in late 2018 after a Chinese executive was detained in Canada and the subsequent arrest of two Canadians in China. All three have since been released, but Ottawa’s allegations of Chinese interference in Canada have kept relations strained.
Joly’s trip comes a week after NATO members, including Canada, issued a declaration in which the 32-nation military alliance called China a “decisive enabler” of Russia’s war effort in Ukraine and said Beijing posed systemic challenges to Euro-Atlantic security.
“We must maintain open lines of communication and use diplomacy to challenge where we ought to, while seeking cooperation in areas that matter most to Canadians. I look forward to a productive meeting,” Joly said.
While Joly’s Beijing visit was announced with short notice, she had been in the region and met with South Korean Foreign Minister Cho Tae-yul in Seoul on Thursday.
(Reporting by Ismail Shakil; Editing by Susan Fenton)
