British foreign minister Yvette Cooper will travel to China tomorrow, and then onwards to India later in the week, with the visits to focus on global issues from the Strait of Hormuz and the Russia-Ukraine war to the recent Ebola outbreak, Reuters reports.

Cooper will meet her Chinese counterpart Wang Yi and Chinese Vice President Han Zheng on June 2, before travelling to the southern tech hub of Shenzhen for a programme focused on science and technology a day later, the government said.

Cooper’s travel to China and India — the world’s second-largest and sixth-largest economies — comes at a time of heightened geopolitical tensions, soaring oil prices following the US-Israeli war on Iran, and as Britain struggles with sluggish economic growth.