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14-11-2023
SAN FRANCISCO/ BEIJING: US President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping are to meet next week in the San Francisco Bay area, two senior administration officials said.
The encounter on 15 November will be only their second face-to-face meeting during the Biden presidency.
It will be wide-ranging, US officials said, with the Israel-Hamas war, Taiwan, war in Ukraine and election interference to be discussed.
Relations between the two countries deteriorated earlier this year.
The US accused China of sending a spy balloon across its air space. An American warplane shot it down off the coast of South Carolina.
There was also a visit to Taiwan last year by then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi, which led China to break off communication between the two nations’ militaries.
Biden is “determined” to restore those channels, US officials said, but China appeared “reluctant” to do so.
“This is not the relationship of five or 10 years ago, we’re not talking about a long list of outcomes or deliverables,” one of the officials said.
“The goals here really are about managing the competition, preventing the downside of risk – of conflict, and ensuring channels of communication are open.”
The Biden-Xi bilateral will take place during the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation (Apec) summit, which the US is hosting in San Francisco from 11 to 17 November.
Taiwan is likely to be at the top of the list of topics China will be keen to discuss. It claims sovereignty over the self-ruled island, which is set to hold elections early next year.
Xi may ask for additional reassurances that the US does not support Taiwanese independence. Biden, meanwhile, is expected to underscore American concerns about Beijing’s military activities around Taiwan, according to a senior administration official.
There will also be discussions about US restrictions on technology exports to China and tensions over Beijing’s territorial claims in the South China and East China Seas.
Aside from these core disagreements over trade and competition, Biden’s most urgent request will be for China to restrain Iran by using what influence Beijing has to warn it against escalating violence in the Middle East in response to the Israel-Hamas war.
Analysts predict the summit may result in some modest achievements – perhaps on restoring military communications and restricting the flow of Chinese-made Fentanyl but neither side is expecting any breakthroughs that would reset the relationship this will be about managing and stabilizing it. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
