Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry will travel to Beijing next week, making him the latest Biden administration official to make a trip to China.

Kerry will travel to Beijing on Sunday and stay until next Wednesday. He is expected to meet with Chinese officials and speak with them about "addressing the climate crisis, including with respect to increasing implementation and ambition and promoting a successful COP28," a State Department spokesperson said Tuesday, referencing the upcoming 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference.

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Kerry, who said in May that Beijing had invited him to visit “in the near term,” last met his Chinese counterpart, Xie Zhenhua, in January.

Relations between Beijing and Washington have reached new lows in recent months amid aggressive Chinese military maneuvers in the Pacific Ocean, China's increasingly bellicose position on Taiwan, renewed attention to PRC abuses against religious minorities, and increasing speculation about the origin of COVID-19, which some believe to have leaked from a lab in southern China. To reduce the tension, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen have traveled to Beijing in recent weeks.

Blinken was supposed to travel to China in February, but this visit was delayed after a suspected Chinese spy balloon traversed the continental United States before being shot down over the Atlantic Ocean. The Chinese government insisted the craft was a weather balloon that had been blown off course.

Chinese military leaders began ignoring outreach from their U.S. counterparts following the incident, and there continues to be silence from them even as other U.S. administration officials travel to Beijing. U.S. officials have said the ongoing silence raises the risk of a possible incident or miscommunication between the two global leaders.

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Shortly after Blinken returned from Beijing last month, President Joe Biden ruffled the feathers of Chinese leaders by referring to Xi Jinping as a dictator.

“The reason why Xi Jinping got very upset in terms of when I shot that balloon down with two box cars full of spy equipment is he didn’t know it was there. No, I’m serious. That was the great embarrassment for dictators, when they didn’t know what happened,” the president said. A Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman called Biden's remarks "extremely absurd and irresponsible."