Mélanie Joly on official visit to China

Photo: Sean Kilpatrick The Canadian Press Mélanie Joly's trip to China is her first since her arrival at the head of Canadian diplomacy in 2021.

France Media Agency in Beijing

Posted at 6:58 a.m.

• Canada

Canadian Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly is going to China on Thursday for an official visit, Chinese diplomacy announced, as the two countries seek to overcome their differences.

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This visit, at the invitation of his counterpart Wang Yi, is scheduled to last until Saturday, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a press release.

This is Ms. Joly's first trip to 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 and even less enemies. They should become cooperation partners,” Wang Yi then argued.

Bilateral relations have been strained since the arrest in 2018 by Canadian authorities of a senior Chinese telecoms giant Huawei and China's retaliatory imprisonment of two Canadian nationals.

While all three have since been released, tensions have continued, Beijing reproaching Ottawa in particular for its alignment with Washington's Chinese policy and the Canadian authorities regularly accusing China of interference.

Suspicions of foreign interference, notably for the benefit of China, Russia and India, pushed the Canadian government to launch a national investigation last year to shed light on these supposed 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 the opposition parties.

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