HONG KONG – President-elect Donald Trump said Thursday that former Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga., has agreed to be nominated to be the next U.S. ambassador to China.

“As a Fortune 500 CEO who has had a 40-year career in international business and served in the U.S. Senate, David brings valuable expertise to expand our relationship with China,” Trump said on his Truth Social platform and noted that Perdue has lived in Singapore and Hong Kong and spent much of his career in China and elsewhere in Asia.

“He will be instrumental in executing my strategy to maintain peace in the region and a productive working relationship with China’s leaders,” Trump said.

Perdue’s nomination requires Senate confirmation.

The bilateral relationship between the United States and China, the world’s two largest economies, is often described as the most important in the world. Relations hit their lowest point in decades in recent years, but both President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping have taken steps to improve them despite ongoing disputes over trade, technology, human rights and the status of Beijing-claimed Taiwan .

Trump, who takes office in January, launched a trade war with China in his first term as president and said he would impose tariffs of 60% or more on all imported Chinese goods in his next term. Last week he said he would impose an additional 10% tariff on Chinese goods unless Beijing does more to stop the international flow of fentanyl precursor chemicals.

Perdue, who visited China in 2018 as part of a congressional delegation, said in a Fox News op-ed written with other senators after the trip that the U.S. needs to “wake up and do a better job competing with China.”

“America’s outdated view of China could lead to missed opportunities or, worse, dangerous miscalculations or complacency,” the senators wrote.

“We must have a long-term plan to compete and deal with China’s growing economic and geopolitical influence.”

Perdue, 74, a former management consultant, was a Republican senator from Georgia from 2015 to 2021. He was a member of the Foreign Relations and Armed Services Committees.

After the 2020 general election, he lost in a runoff to Democrat Jon Ossoff.

In 2022, he ran for governor after Trump recruited him to challenge Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, who refused to help Trump overturn Georgia’s election results in 2020 when the state voted for Biden . Perdue lost to Kemp in the Republican primary by more than 50 percentage points.

“David has been a loyal supporter and friend and I look forward to working with him in his new role!” Trump said on Thursday.

Before entering the Senate, Perdue had a long corporate career, including serving as president and CEO of Reebok and CEO of Dollar General and North Carolina textile company PillowTex.

Current U.S. Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns told NBC News in October that competition between the U.S. and China will continue “into the next decade.”

“It’s a very challenging relationship,” he said. “But it is without question the most consequential relationship we Americans have with any other country.”

Xi told Biden last month that he would work with the Trump administration and that “China’s goal of a stable, healthy and sustainable China-US relationship remains unchanged.”