Canadian Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly is heading to China on Thursday for an official visit, Chinese diplomacy announced, as the two countries seek to overcome their differences.
The visit, at the invitation of his counterpart Wang Yi, is due to last until Saturday, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
This is M’s first tripme Joly in this country since her arrival at the head of Canadian diplomacy in 2021. The minister had already met her Chinese counterpart in February, on the sidelines of the Security Conference in Munich, Germany.
“The two countries are not rivals, much less enemies. They should become cooperative partners,” Wang Yi had argued at the time.
Bilateral relations have been strained since the 2018 arrest by Canadian authorities of a manager of Chinese telecoms giant Huawei and the retaliatory imprisonment by China of two Canadian nationals.
While all three have since been released, tensions have persisted, with Beijing criticizing Ottawa for aligning with Washington’s China policy and Canadian authorities regularly accusing China of interference.
Suspicions of foreign interference, particularly by China, Russia and India, prompted the Canadian government to launch a national investigation last year to shed light on these alleged infiltrations.
These accusations of Chinese interference, relating to the last two federal elections in Canada in 2019 and 2021, have put Justin Trudeau’s government under pressure from opposition parties.
To see in video