Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is making a long-awaited trip to China this week

The most recent flareup came after President Joe Biden referred to Chinese President Xi Jinping as a "dictator " during a campaign fundraiser earlier in June. The Chinese protested loudly, but Biden later said his blunt statements regarding China are “just not something I’m going to change very much.”

Yellen's trip would follow Secretary of State Antony Blinken's two-day stop in Beijing in June, the highest-level meetings in China in the past five years. Blinken met with Xi and the two agreed to stabilize deteriorated U.S.-China ties. However, better communications between their militaries could not be agreed upon. Treasury officials didn't specify which officials she'd meet with, but said it would not be Xi.

The treasury secretary's visit will be more focused on stabilizing the global economy and challenging China's support of Russia in its ongoing land invasion of Ukraine. China has developed an uncomfortable closeness with the Kremlin — claiming neutrality in the war, but holding joint military drills and frequent state visits with Russian officials.

Still, U.S. officials hold out hope that U.S-China relations will not further deteriorate.

Yellen met with her previous Chinese counterpart, Vice Premier Liu He, in January in Switzerland and made a big speech at Johns Hopkins University in April calling for “ cooperation on the urgent global challenges of our day ” between the two countries for the sake of maintaining global stability, while supporting economic restrictions on China to advance U.S national security interests.

At a Paris summit on global finance last week, a deal was brokered that restructured Zambia's debt with its creditors, which include China — Zambia’s biggest creditor holding $4.1 billion of a total $6.3 billion debt load. The deal may provide a roadmap for how China will handle restructuring deals with other nations in debt distress, and shows the Asian superpower is willing to cooperate in negotiations with other Group of 20 nations.

“I am pleased that the international community has come together to support Zambia in its time of need,” Yellen said in a statement last week.

However, there are plenty of other tensions impacting the superpowers' relationship. The discovery of a Chinese surveillance balloon traversing over sensitive areas of the U.S. in February put a damper on her previous travel plans, and further strained relations.

U.S. lawmakers earlier this year grilled TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew about data security and the social media firm's ties to China, with some pushing a ban on the app, popular among American youths.

And last October, the Biden administration imposed export controls to limit China’s ability to access advanced chips, which it says can be used to make weapons, commit human rights abuses and improve the speed and accuracy of China's military logistics.

Yellen's trip also comes as Biden considers issuing an executive order that would tighten rules on some overseas investments by U.S. companies in an effort to limit China’s ability to acquire technologies that could improve its military prowess.

Still, trade entwines the U.S. and Chinese economies. And despite strong speeches about the need to rethink the relationship, Yellen said in her Johns Hopkins address that “a full separation of our economies would be disastrous for both countries. It would be destabilizing for the rest of the world. Rather, we know that the health of the Chinese and U.S. economies is closely linked.”

China shipped more than $536 billion worth of goods to the U.S. last year. By contrast, the U.S. exported $154 billion in goods to China, according to the Census Bureau.

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Associated Press writer Colleen Long contributed to this report.