New | Xi and Biden: What the White House says they talked about - full transcript

President Xi Jinping and the US vice-president Joe Biden met yesterday with the shadow of simmering tensions between China and Japan hanging over them. Shortly afterwards, senior administration officials at the White House released a background briefing on the conversation between the two men. Here is the transcript in full.

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: What I thought I’d do in a reasonably scattered and semi-coherent way, given the lateness of the hour and the length of the sessions we’ve just come out of, is walk through the Vice President’s meetings with President Xi today, and then open it up to a few questions from you guys. And then maybe we can spend a few minutes off the record at the end of that - a little more texture and colour.

So just to situate all of you, the Vice President spent a combined total of five and a half hours with President Xi today in three formats. He spent about two hours in a restricted meeting with a small handful of aides on each side. He spent an hour and a half in a larger expanded meeting and they had a substantial delegation on each side, and about two hours at a small working dinner, again, with just a few aides on each side.

The conversations ranged from the strategic to the detailed, and covered every significant topic in the US-China relationship. And sometimes topics were covered two or three times over the course of an evolving five-and-a-half-hour conversation. The conversation was very much a back-and-forth. It reflected the casual candor that these two leaders have developed over the course of their relationship. And it was firmly punctuated by references to previous conversations where the two of them were picking up on threads that had started back in Chengdu or in Los Angeles or wherever it might be. And there was a real ease to the conversation in that respect, even though they were dealing with some difficult issues and having very direct discussions about them.

So this was my first time seeing the Vice President with President Xi, and I was quite taken aback by the nature of the dynamic between them -- the comfort that they have with one another, their willingness to really talk about the issues in a way that was personal, anecdotal, sort of building on each other’s analysis. It was not just a back-and-forth of talking points by any stretch of the imagination. And I know that we often come back and tell you that, but I promise you, this time it’s true. (Laughter.)

So with that, let me just run through some of the issues that were covered. They spent a good amount of time sort of throughout the discussion stepping back to look at the overall bilateral relationship and all of its complexities -- the need to build trust, the need to expand practical cooperation, the need to manage differences effectively, predictably, the need to be direct and candid with one another. And in fact, both President Xi and Vice President Biden remarked to one another that the strength of their personal relationship lies in the fact that they can be very direct about difficult issues. And obviously, also with respect to the bilateral relationship, the need for a consistent and sustained high-level engagement at the leadership level, and the view that they share that there’s really no substitute for these extended personal conversations between the leaders of each country.

They spent a substantial amount of time on North Korea, and they reviewed the internal situation in North Korea in light of some of the news reports in recent days. And they talked at some length about what the Iran example suggests for North Korea, and that is to say a combination of pressure plus dialogue plus international community unity - and especially unity among the significant global power -- is what brought Iran to the table to deal constructively, and the same recipe can apply for North Korea.