A day after Biden confirmed that he was planning to speak with Xi as they are set to attend the G20 summit being held next week in Indonesia, a senior administration official revealed that the two men have finalized their plans to hold talks on Monday.
While the two leaders have held five calls via telephone and virtual link, this would be the first time they encounter one another face-to-face since Biden took office early last year. The senior administration official reiterated the U.S. president’s belief that “there is no substitute” for in-person conversations, and previewed his expectations for what was anticipated to be an “in-depth” and “strategic” discussion.
This discussion was expected to cover foreign policy hotspots that are raising tensions across the globe.
The official noted that “the United States and China have a history of working together” on issues surrounding the Korean Peninsula, where cross-border incidents have erupted as the U.S. and South Korea intensified joint exercises and North Korea ramped up weapons testing.
The official added that Biden “will be honest and direct with President Xi about how the situation in Ukraine with Russia’s war of aggression and our concerns about what we are seeing and hearing from Russia.”
In addition to finding ways to jointly address “transnational challenges that affect the international community,” the official said Biden would look to “establish rules of the road” in managing their bilateral competition.
“The way we’ve heard this from our Chinese friends, is ‘stopping the downward spiral,’ the official said. “That’s how they characterize this and so that I think is part of it for us.”
But when asked about China’s repeated criticism about what it sees as a policy of trying to contain the rise of the People’s Republic through both military and legislative measures, the official said Biden would seek to assuage Xi’s concerns.
“Just to be clear, our policy is not containment, so that is not how we would see anything that’s laid out in our strategy documents,” the official said. “And I think that the president will be clear with that if President Xi were to ask that question.”
Regarding restrictions the administration has pursued on Chinese technology in fields such as semiconductor production, the official said that “we’ve been quite clear that our concern is with certain high-end technologies that feed into Beijing’s development of high-end military applications.”
“It’s a targeted approach. It is an approach that is specifically driven by those national security and military concerns and it is not something that is more broadly targeted, at somehow having a broader impact on China’s economy or on the Chinese people,” the official explained.
“So I think that he would just simply reject the characterization that some in Beijing may have been applying that this is containment,” the official added.
In discussing a potential meeting with Xi, Biden said Wednesday he planned to lay out “what each of our red lines are, understand what he believes to be in the critical national interests of China, what I know to be the critical interests of the United States, and to determine whether or not they conflict with one another.”
“And if they do,” the president added, “how to resolve it and how to work it out.”
Biden also touched upon the issue of Taiwan, the most sensitive foreign policy issue straining ties between the U.S. and China.
China has laid claim to the island since Communists won the mainland after a civil war with Nationalists in 1949. Though Washington broke official ties with Taipei three decades later in order to build diplomatic relations with Beijing, the U.S. has maintained informal relations with Taiwan in the form of political contacts and military aid that has increased in recent years, including under Biden.
And in breaking with a decades-long policy of strategic ambiguity, Biden has stated four times that he respond with military action if China sought to reunify with Taiwan by force, only for his administration to walk back on the comments each time. Tensions on the issue spiked in August when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited the disputed island about a week after Biden’s previous call with Xi, prompting massive Chinese military exercises and the suspension of bilateral cooperation with the U.S. on a number of key issues.
“The Taiwan doctrine has not changed at all from the very beginning,” Biden said Wednesday. “So, I’m sure we’ll discuss Taiwan. And I’m sure we’ll discuss a number of other issues, including fair trade and relationships relating to his relationship with other countries in the region.”
Prior to Thursday’s press call, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian confirmed that Biden and Xi’s teams were “in communication” on planning a meeting, and he commented on the U.S. leader’s plans to talk “red lines” with his Chinese counterpart.
“China’s U.S. policy is consistent and clear,” Zhao said. “We are committed to mutual respect, peaceful coexistence and win-win cooperation with the U.S. At the same time, we will firmly defend our sovereignty, security and development interests.”
And on the question of Taiwan, Zhao said the issue “is at the heart of China’s core interests” and that “the one-China principle is the cornerstone of the political foundation for China-U.S. relations; the three China-US Joint Communiqués are the most crucial ‘guardrails’ for our relations.”
“What the U.S. should do is stop fudging, distorting and hollowing out the one-China principle, strictly abide by the basic norms of international relations including respect for other countries’ sovereignty and territorial integrity and non-interference in other countries’ internal affairs, and return to the three China-U.S. joint communiqués and the one-China principle,” he added.
Zhao also asserted that the two countries should strive to improve bilateral ties on trade and economics, accusing Washington of politicizing the matter.
“The economic and trade relations between China and the US are mutually beneficial and win-win in nature,” Zhao said. “The U.S. should stop using economic and trade issues as a political tool or making them an ideological matter. Instead, the US should take concrete actions to uphold the rules of market economy and the international trading system.”
“The development of state-to-state relations is not a zero-sum game,” he added. “China always stands for inclusive partnership that does not target any third party and rejects coercing countries into choosing sides.”
Newsweek has reached out to the Chinese Embassy in Washington, D.C. for comment.
This is a developing news story. More information will be added as it becomes available.
