Secretary of State Antony Blinken will travel to China later this week, embarking on a trip that had been delayed by months after the spy balloon incident.

Blinken, who will travel to Beijing and London from June 16-21, will meet with "senior PRC officials where he will discuss the importance of maintaining open lines of communication to responsibly manage the U.S.-PRC relationship," State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said in a statement on Wednesday.

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"He will also raise bilateral issues of concern, global and regional matters, and potential cooperation on shared transnational challenges," the spokesman added.

The secretary planned to travel to Beijing in February, but the trip was postponed after a Chinese spy balloon traversed the continental United States before the U.S. military shot it down over the Atlantic Ocean. The balloon, which Beijing denied had surveillance capabilities, traveled over sensitive military sites as it traveled eastward.

The incident led China's military officials to give their U.S. counterparts the silent treatment, while the People's Liberation Army has consistently engaged in aggressive military maneuvers in the region for more than a year.

Ely Ratner, the assistant secretary of defense for the Indo-Pacific, said the department had seen "a steep rise in the region of [People's Liberation Army] aerial intercepts in particular" over the last 18 months, which he called a "major problem."

Also since Blinken canceled the trip, a Chinese aircraft conducted an aggressive maneuver toward a U.S. Air Force aircraft, while a Chinese naval ship sailed in the way of a pair of U.S. and Canadian ships in the Taiwan Strait.

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Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin briefly met with Minister of National Defense Li Shangfu at the Shangri-La summit in Singapore earlier this month, but it was not a substantive conversation, and the Chinese denied a request for a more formal meeting.

The administration also acknowledged this week that Beijing has a spy facility in Cuba that was updated in 2019.