President Biden will meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping next Wednesday, on Nov. 15, in the San Francisco Bay area, according to two senior administration officials. The president and the U.S. will work on reopening important military communications channels that have been cut off, managing competition and addressing security issues.
This will be the two leaders’ seventh interaction during Mr. Biden’s presidency and the pair’s second in-person meeting. In a briefing with reporters, senior administration officials said the U.S. realizes the increased tensions between the U.S. and China have altered their relationship and shifted key priorities for the meeting of the two presidents.
“This is not the relationship of five or 10 years ago — we’re not talking about a long list of outcomes or deliverables. The goals here really are about managing the competition, preventing the downside of risk of conflict and ensuring channels of communication are open,” one official said.
“We’re clear-eyed about this,” another official said. “We know efforts to shape or reform China over several decades have failed, but we expect China to be around and to be a major player on the world stage for the rest of our lifetimes.”
The most pressing issue is the ongoing silence between the two nations’ militaries that has lasted over a year, after China cut off military communication following then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in August 2022.
Mr. Biden is “determined” to take steps to restore the crucial communication, U.S. officials said, noting however, the Chinese remain “reluctant” to do so.
The American officials said U.S. diplomats have raised the importance of re-establishing this dialogue in “nearly every conversation” that U.S. officials have had with their Chinese counterparts over the past year, but without success.
Another sticking point delaying the restoration of military-to-military communication is the subject of the Chinese spy balloon shot down by a U.S. fighter jet in February, which “comes up often” in discussions about the military silence, one official said.
“I think the balloon episode underscored the difficulty we had at the time to be able to establish high-level, consequential communications with Beijing. And we’ve made that case persistently and consistently,” the official added.
President Biden and the U.S. will also address several “contentious” international and regional issues with China.
Citing China’s “burgeoning relationship” with Iran, Mr. Biden is expected to “underscore” that it is “essential that Iran not seek to escalate or spread violence in the Middle East, and to warn quite clearly that if Iran undertakes provocative actions anywhere, that the United States is prepared to respond and respond promptly,” one of the officials explained.
The U.S. and Taiwan are each holding presidential elections next year, which one official warned “could make this quite a bumpy year.” The U.S. is expected to underscore concerns about a “ramping up of military activities around Taiwan,” one senior official said, describing the current aggression as “unprecedented,” “dangerous” and “provocative.”
The president and his team also plan to address Chinese-made fentanyl, artificial intelligence, and U.S. detainees in China, and they’re also expected to warn China about operating election influence operations in the U.S. elections again.
As they discuss this wide range of issues, the U.S. officials said they will be assessing whether China truly wants to improve relations with the U.S. or if the diplomacy next week is mainly for its own “tactical” and “short-term measures.”
“We’re going to interrogate those assumptions closely and clearly,” the official added.
Xi is supposed to formally announce on Friday his intention to attend the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in San Francisco next week, which will serve as the backdrop for the Biden-Xi meeting.
Mr. Biden frequently notes his personal relationship with Xi, forged over 12 years now, after the two men met when both were vice presidents.
This is Xi’s first trip to the U.S. in six years. He also traveled to California a decade ago, for a summit in Rancho Mirage with President Obama in 2013, months after he assumed the presidency from Hu Jintao.
