Xi to Make First Foreign Trip Since Pandemic Began

What’s new: President Xi Jinping will pay state visits to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan from Wednesday to Friday, during which he will attend a leadership summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in the Uzbek city of Samarkand, China’s foreign ministry announced Monday.

The three-day visit to the Central Asian countries will be Xi’s first foreign trip in the nearly three years since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, which initially emerged in the Central Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019.