The White House announced that on Wednesday, President Joe Biden will meet Chinese President Xi Jinping in person for the first time in a year. The meeting is part of high-stakes diplomatic efforts to ease tensions between the world’s two giants.
The meeting, which took place on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in the San Francisco Bay area, was closely watched. It could last hours and include teams of officials from both Beijing and Washington.
Senior Biden administration officials say it will likely cover a wide range of global problems, such as the war between Israel and Hamas, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, North Korea’s relationship with Russia, Taiwan, the Indo-Pacific, human rights, fentanyl, AI, and “fair” trade and economic relations.
“Nothing will be held back; everything is on the table,” a US source who did not want to be named told reporters in a briefing.
“We have no doubts about this. We know that over the past few decades, efforts to change or shape China have failed. We think China will be a big player on the world stage for as long as we live, though.
People in the US have been pushing for the meeting for almost a year because they think Beijing has been working to damage US policy all over the world.
The White House said in a statement on Friday that the meeting would happen on that day. Friday, China’s foreign ministry said that Xi would come to the US from November 14th to 17th to attend the APEC meeting and meet with Vice President Biden.
Biden and Xi will talk for the first time since November 2022, even though their ideas are very different. After Biden ordered the shooting down of a suspected Chinese spy balloon that flew over the US in February, the president’s team went on a diplomatic blitz to make things better with China.
As a main result, there are hopes for more diplomatic talks on important problems like climate change, global health, economic stability, drug-fighting efforts, and maybe even the start of some military-to-military channels again after a high-level freeze.
Two other people who know about the talks say that both sides may make small acts of kindness to make things easier.
But it will be hard to make real progress. Officials from both the US and China say they see themselves more and more as competing directly to gain a military edge, control the economy of the 21st century, and win the hearts of smaller countries.
Plans to carefully plan Xi’s visit could go wrong in the tense city in Northern California, which has a long history of left-wing protests and unrest.
Biden and Xi have known each other for more than ten years and have talked for hours six times since Biden was inaugurated in 2021. Analysts say that both guys come to the table with a lot of mistrust, anger, and a jumbled idea of what the other is looking for.
Biden is likely to talk about sensitive issues like Chinese “influence operations” in other countries’ elections and the status of US citizens that the US thinks are being wrongfully held in China.
Biden, who is 80 years old, is in charge of an economy that has done better than most rich countries expected it to after the COVID-19 pandemic. He is running for a second term even though people at home don’t like him. This is because they are worried about the stability of US democracy.
Still, Biden has rallied the country’s traditional allies from Europe to Asia to stand up to Russia in Ukraine, even though some of them disagree with him about the war between Israel and Hamas.
In Asia, Washington is calling on its many allies, such as NATO and the defence deals in the Pacific, to avoid a war with China.
Xi, who is ten years younger than Biden, has changed the constitution and tightened control over policy, state leaders, the media, and the military. He is now the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao Zedong. Recently, the country’s economy has been having more problems, which has thrown it off its rocket-fueled growth path of the past 30 years.
Diplomats in Washington think that China will test the US in the next few weeks, using what it sees as the US’s change in focus from Iran and Ukraine to its own goals in the Indo-Pacific.
Biden is likely to tell Xi that the US will keep its promises in the Indo-Pacific. In the past few years, China’s actions in the Taiwan Strait, the South China Sea, and the East China Sea have caused worry among its neighbours. One US source said that Biden will also make a clear promise to protect the safety of the Philippines.
An official said that Biden will also ask Xi to tell Iran that it would be foolish to try to make the war in the Middle East worse.
