Biden and Xi to meet on the sidelines of the APEC Conference in the Bay Area: “Intense diplomacy”
President Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping are expected to meet Wednesday on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference in the Bay Area, a meeting that officials hope will ease tensions amid ongoing wars. They flog Israel. and Ukraine.
The meeting will take place in San Francisco and will be a setting for “intense diplomacy,” a senior administration official said.
The White House says Biden and Xi are expected to discuss the US-China relationship, including the importance of maintaining “open lines of communication.”
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A senior administration official said the two leaders will also discuss “managing competition responsibly” along with a variety of regional, global and transnational issues, including Russia’s war in Ukraine, the war between Israel and Hamas and the rising conflicts in the Middle East.
“There will be a conversation about North Korea about some of our concerns regarding the relationship with Russia in Ukraine,” a senior official said. “I think with respect to the Middle East, I think the president will underscore our desire for China to make clear in its burgeoning relationship with Iran that it is essential that Iran not seek to escalate or spread violence in the Middle East, and that “We warn, quite strongly clarity, that if Iran takes provocative actions anywhere, the United States is prepared to respond and respond promptly.”
President Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping shake hands before their meeting on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Bali, Indonesia, on November 14, 2022. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
The two are also expected to discuss additional “potentially contentious” topics, including election interference, with Biden planning to warn Xi about potential election influence operations.
This week’s meeting will be the second in-person meeting between Biden and Xi since the start of the Biden administration in January 2021, but it will be the “seventh interaction,” the official said.
Biden and Xi last met in November 2022 on the sidelines of the G20 Summit in Bali, Indonesia, where they agreed that more direct communication between US and Chinese leaders was desirable.
“Both leaders have a long-standing relationship that began when they were both vice presidents,” the official said. “They’ve known each other for about a dozen years.”
The officials said that over the past eight months the Biden administration has been working to “restore diplomatic interaction.” During that time, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan met three times with Chinese director Wang Yi; Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo traveled to Beijing; and China has sent its vice president, foreign minister and other senior officials to the United States to meet.
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“Over the past nearly three years, the administration has examined the strategic landscape, assessed the challenge and taken a series of purposeful strategic actions both at home and abroad in a diplomatic context that we believe is holding up,” the official said.
But Wednesday’s meeting between Biden and Xi comes at a critical moment, one that Biden administration officials say is ripe for “high-level diplomacy.”
The Biden administration says its approach is “steady and consistent.”
President Biden shakes hands with Chinese President Xi Jinping as they meet on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Bali, Indonesia, on November 14, 2022. (Reuters/Kevin Lamarque)
“We are not going to take a step back in our interests and values. We are moving forward in them,” said a senior official while noting that they have “clear eyes on the matter.”
“We also believe that intense competition requires and demands intense diplomacy to manage tensions and prevent competition from escalating to conflict or confrontation,” an official said. “We hope that China will continue to be present and be a major player on the world stage for the rest of our lives.”
Senior Biden administration officials say the meeting remains in line with the United States’ “decades of experience” in speaking and “working with competitors when our interests require it.”
“And this meeting with President Xi is in keeping with that tradition of American statecraft,” one official said. “And in this meeting, I think we can expect us to build on that experience as we stabilize the relationship and deliver in a material and tangible way for the American people.”
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The goal of the meeting, one official said, is not to return with “results” but rather to ensure that the administration is “managing competition, preventing the negative risk of conflict and ensuring that communication channels are open.”
A pilot looks toward a suspected Chinese spy balloon on February 3, 2023. (US Air Force)
A critical line of discussion, officials said, will be to open lines of communication between U.S. and Chinese military channels, especially in light of the Chinese surveillance balloon that passed over the continental United States in February.
“This is absolutely critical. And when we talk about managing risk, about avoiding conflict, this is exactly the type of communication that we need to have, both at the senior levels of our two militaries but also between operators,” the official said. saying. “The balloon often comes up in the context of the need for communications between our two sides. And I think the balloon episode underscored the difficulty we had at the time in being able to establish important, high-level communications with Beijing.”
“We have made that argument persistently and consistently,” the official continued. “I think the president can be expected to raise the overall parameters of the ‘thousand-for-thousand’ engagement with President Xi next week.”
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The official said Biden and administration officials have raised the issue in “every meeting.”
“I think it’s fair to say that the Chinese have been reluctant. That’s why the president will push hard next week,” the official said.
