U.S. President Joe Biden named to lead the Central Intelligence Agency is creating a high-level unit aimed at sharpening the agency's focus on China, at a time of tense relations between the world's two largest economies.

CIA Director William Burns said on Thursday that the China Mission Center he was setting up "cuts across all of the agency's mission areas," while noting that the CIA's concern is that "the threat is from the Chinese government, not its people."

A senior CIA official compared Burns' creation of the China unit to the agency's tight focus on Russia during the Cold War and to its concentration on counter-terrorism following the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington. No such high-level unit focusing explicitly on China had previously been set up by the agency.

The new China unit was one of several re-shuffles resulting from a broad review the agency launched last spring, the senior official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Other agency moves include merging an Iran Mission Center set up by the Trump administration into a broader Middle East unit and merging a unit focusing on Korea with a broader East Asia-Pacific unit, the official said.