US Secretary of State Antony Blinken met Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang and top diplomat Wang Yi in Beijing on Sunday on a diplomatic mission to cool US-China tensions that have overshadowed geopolitics in recent months.

Blinken’s trip makes him the highest-ranking US official to visit China since Joe Biden became US president and the first US secretary of state to make the trip in nearly five years.

Blinken’s original travel plans for February were disrupted by news of an alleged Chinese spy balloon flying over US airspace. The US eventually shot down the alleged spy balloon, and tensions between the world’s two largest economies have remained tense ever since. Beijing insisted the balloon was an unnamed weather tracker that had gone off course.

Blinken will have a working dinner at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse with Qin, who was formerly China’s ambassador to the US, later on Sunday. Some reports suggest there may also be a meeting with President Xi Jinping on Monday during Blinken’s two-day visit.

Expectations for a significant recovery in US-China relations, particularly as a result of Blinken’s trip, remain low. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said in a statement last week that Blinken will discuss the importance of keeping lines of communication open and will “raise bilateral issues, global and regional issues, and potential cooperation on common transnational challenges.”

At the annual Shangri-La Dialogue event in Singapore earlier this month, the US defense chief and his Chinese counterpart he didn’t have a formal meeting. And more generally, international travel restrictions during the Covid-19 pandemic have limited contact between the US and Chinese governments.

In August and Nancy Pelosi’s controversial visit to Taiwan, then-Speaker of the US House of Representatives, stoked Beijing’s ire. Beijing considers Taiwan a part of its territory and does not have the right to independently conduct diplomatic relations. The US recognizes Beijing as China’s sole legitimate government, while maintaining unofficial relations with the island, a democratically self-governing region.

Biden’s visit to Beijing could also pave the way for a November meeting between the two Biden and its Chinese counterpart Xi — their first since Bali in November, the day before the start of the G-20 summit.

In late May, the US Secretary of Commerce and her Chinese counterpart they met in Washington, DC And US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is expected to visit China at an unspecified time.

China’s new ambassador to the US, Xie Feng, arrived in the US in late May after a period of about six months without anyone in that position. Biden said around the same time that he expected tensions between the US and China to “start to melt away very soon”.

A potential opportunity for Biden and Xi to meet again would be in November, during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Leaders’ Summit to be held in San Francisco.