China's environment minister, Huang Runqiu, made a rare visit to the United States last week, as Beijing pushes green cooperation to mend ties with Washington.

Huang is the first Chinese official at ministerial level or above who has made a public visit to Washington during the presidency of Joe Biden, after face-to-face gatherings between officials of the two countries were affected by their worsening relationship and the pandemic.

The visit came a week after Beijing and Washington agreed to step up cooperation on climate change during talks between Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken early this month in Bali.

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On Friday, China's Minister of Ecology and Environment Huang held bilateral meetings in Washington with US Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, deputy administrator of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Janet McCabe and Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, according to a readout from Huang's ministry on Monday.

China-US collaboration on the environment and climate was a model for all-round multilevel and multi-field cooperation, Huang said.

He praised the US side for its experience, providing "a useful reference for China to improve the laws, regulations and policies related to climate change and ecological environment protection".

Long-term cooperation between China and the US in the environmental protection industry had achieved good results, the minister said.

"The two countries have opened up their markets for technical services and products related to addressing climate change and ecological and environmental protection," Huang said, adding it strongly supported low-carbon energy transition and improving the quality of the environment and ecology for a "win-win".

China was willing to work with the US to strengthen cooperation to manage plastic waste in the oceans and looked forward to seeing more practical results, he said.

According to the EPA's Twitter account, the agency welcomed Huang and his delegation to the US "to highlight the long-standing relationship on environmental protection" between the two countries. It described Huang's meeting with McCabe in Washington as "productive".

The Californian governor's office signed a memorandum of understanding on climate cooperation with China in April. A news release from the governor's office said Huang's meeting this week was to advance their climate partnership.

The US side did not publish a statement of the meeting between Raimondo and Huang.

Lu Xiang, a US-China expert and senior fellow with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said the minister's trip to the US, and particularly his talks in Washington with counterparts, carried significant meaning after such exchanges had almost disappeared since the Covid-19 pandemic started.

In June 2020, China's top diplomat, Yang Jiechi, met then-US secretary of state Mike Pompeo in Hawaii, and before that the last senior official to visit Washington was Chinese Vice-Premier Liu He to conclude the phase-one trade agreement early in 2020.

Since the Trump presidency there has been tension related to human rights issues, technology disputes, trade tariffs and territorial disputes in the South and East China seas. And US-China relations have grown increasingly strained in recent months amid complaints from Washington about Beijing's refusal to condemn Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

"Since the pandemic, our senior and middle-level officials have rarely made foreign visits, which limited the effect of our diplomacy," Lu said. "The more there was a lack of communication, the more detrimental to bilateral relations and more suspicions there will be."

Against that backdrop Huang's trip was "meaningful", he said, and it was "natural" for an environment minister to kick off such trips because climate change was viewed by both sides as a field for cooperation.

However, some analysts remain sceptical about the impact of such meetings on overall US-China relations. Shi Yinhong, an international relations scholar at Renmin University, said Huang's visit to the US was not likely to change the fundamental structure of China-US climate cooperation.

"Sometimes, the two sides expressed generally that they could cooperate, but when it comes to specific things, the scope [of cooperation] is relatively narrow," Shi said.

He also said the meaning of face-to-face meetings should not be overestimated.

"I don't believe that talking on the phone or video is necessarily worse than meeting face to face to improve a relationship," he said.

This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP's Facebook and Twitter pages. Copyright © 2022 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.

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