Chinese President Xi Jinping, left, and U.S. President Joe Biden meet on the sidelines of the G20 Summit, in Bali, Indonesia, in 2022.SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images
U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping will meet on the sidelines of a summit in San Francisco this month, Washington confirmed Tuesday, as both sides look once again to reset their often difficult relationship amid the global turmoil caused by wars in Ukraine and the Middle East.
Speaking in the U.S. capital, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Mr. Biden is looking forward to a “constructive meeting” at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit, which begins Nov. 14.
Washington believes the best way to manage “intense competition” with Beijing is through “intense diplomacy,” Ms. Jean-Pierre added. “And that’s what’s going to be happening with the President.”
The announcement – which Ms. Jean-Pierre appeared to make inadvertently but then confirmed when asked by reporters – follows weeks of rapprochement on both sides, including a warm welcome for California Governor Gavin Newsom in Beijing and a visit to the U.S. last week by Chinese Foreign Affairs Minister Wang Yi.
The San Francisco summit will be the first time Mr. Xi and Mr. Biden have spoken face to face since November, 2022, when they met in Bali, Indonesia, on the sidelines of the G20 summit. Those talks represented Mr. Xi’s desire to put the relationship “back on the track of healthy and stable development,” Beijing said, but the “Bali consensus” was quickly derailed by a Chinese spy balloon, U.S. restrictions on technology exports and tensions over Taiwan.
Speaking to reporters in Beijing on Wednesday, Chinese Foreign Affairs Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said the two sides have “agreed to work together toward a San Francisco summit” and should seek to return to the Bali consensus. But he added that the road to California cannot rely “on automatic driving.”
Jude Blanchette, a Washington-based China expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said this month’s meeting will be one of “appropriately low expectations.”
“The point of the meeting is the meeting,” Mr. Blanchette said. “It is as much about future-proofing the relationship over the next 12 months as additional engagement or any massive breakthroughs.”
In particular, he added, good optics from a Xi-Biden summit could help unlock parts of the Chinese system that have been wary of engaging with the U.S., “to really push for more meaningful engagement and dialogue on shared challenges and mutual antagonisms.”
This could see greater co-operation on topics such as climate change and fentanyl production, while also cooling the rhetoric around hot-button issues such as Taiwan and the South China Sea, where China is currently engaged in a standoff with the Philippines, a key U.S. ally.
In another sign that Beijing is keen to secure a smooth meeting between the two leaders, Hong Kong announced Tuesday that its chief executive, John Lee, would not be attending the APEC summit due to “scheduling issues.”
The U.S. sanctioned Mr. Lee, a former security chief, for his role in cracking down on Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement, and there were fears he might be barred from travelling to California, potentially creating a diplomatic crisis that Beijing would be hard-pressed to ignore. Instead, Hong Kong will be represented at the APEC summit by Financial Secretary Paul Chan.
James Palmer, the author of Foreign Policy’s China Brief, said the apparent détente should not distract from the deep divisions in the U.S.-China relationship.
“Despite all the relatively pleasant words behind closed doors, Chinese officialdom and state media remains virulently anti-Western, to a far greater degree than before the COVID-19 pandemic,” Mr. Palmer wrote this week. “The recent Belt and Road summit in Beijing saw a full-throated embrace of Moscow, reinforced this week at a meeting of Russian and Chinese military leaders, which also saw both sides denouncing Washington.”
Mr. Xi is caught between a desire for a more stable relationship with the West, Mr. Palmer said, as evidenced by upcoming meetings with Mr. Biden and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, and the need for a “scapegoat for all of China’s problems,” as the country’s economy lags and public discontent grows.
This leads to a particularly brittle relationship on both sides – as seen during the spy balloon incident, when political furor in the U.S. resulted in the cancellation of a trip by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken to Beijing, significantly setting back stabilization efforts. Chinese reactions to U.S. engagement with Taiwan are further evidence.
The U.S. and Chinese governments are both subject to nationalist domestic pressure, Mr. Blanchette said, as well as volatile international situations where they have fundamental disagreements – on Ukraine, how to respond to the war in the Middle East and over Taiwan. The latter issue is certain to come up in conversation between Mr. Biden and Mr. Xi, but whatever reassurance either side can provide, the other will be tested when the self-ruled island holds elections in January, just as the U.S. presidential race is heating up.
In addition to growing tensions in the South China Sea, Mr. Blanchette said, “Taiwan remains the biggest issue if you’re thinking about why can’t U.S-China relations improve.”