President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping will meet Wednesday in California for talks on trade, Taiwan and managing fraught US-Chinese relations in the first engagement between the leaders of the world’s two biggest economies in nearly a year, Biden administration officials said.
The White House has said for weeks that it anticipated Biden and Xi would meet on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in San Francisco, but negotiations went down to the eve of the gathering, which kicks off Saturday.
The officials, who briefed reporters on the condition of anonymity under ground rules set by the White House, said Friday that the leaders would meet in the San Francisco Bay area but declined to offer further details because of security concerns. Thousands of protesters are expected to descend on San Francisco during the summit.
The meeting is not expected to lead to many, if any, major announcements and differences between the two powers certainly won’t be resolved. Instead, one official said, Biden is looking toward “managing the competition, preventing the downside risk of conflict and ensuring channels of communication are open.”
Differences in the already complicated US-Chinese relationship have only sharpened in the last year, with Beijing bristling over new U.S. export controls on advanced technology; Biden ordering the shooting down of a Chinese spy balloon after it traversed the continental United States; and Chinese anger over a stopover in the U.S. by Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen earlier this year, among other issues. China claims the island as its territory.
Biden and Xi last met nearly a year ago on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit in Bali, Indonesia. In the nearly three-hour meeting, Biden objected directly to China’s “coercive and increasingly aggressive actions” toward Taiwan and discussed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and other issues.
Xi stressed that “the Taiwan question is at the very core of China’s core interests, the bedrock of the political foundation of China-US relations, and the first red line that must not be crossed in China-US relations.”
Next week’s meeting comes as the United States braces for a potentially bumpy year for US-Chinese relations, with Taiwan set to hold a presidential election in January and the U.S. holding its own presidential election next November.
The Biden administration has sought to make clear to the Chinese that any actions or interference in the 2024 election “would raise extremely strong concerns from our side,” according to one official.
The officials also noted that Biden is determined to restore military-to-military communications that Beijing largely withdrew from after then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in August 2022.
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