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On Balance | Will Xi meet Biden? China should decide after the results of US midterms are known
- To set the negotiating table at which Biden and Xi might sit, both sides must recognise that there’s no way back to the old bilateral relationship
- China has stopped moving away from its authoritarian past, while the US is about to be a country where election deniers may prevail
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No US State Department or National Security Council press briefing is complete these days without an attempt to get confirmation that Joe Biden and Xi Jinping will meet in person as presidents for the first time at the G20 summit in Indonesia this month.
On Friday, less than two weeks before the leaders’ summit on the resort island of Bali, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby responded to one of the more creative ways to ask whether the two would meet: had council officials “seen a shift in terms of the tempo or tone of discussions of engagement” since Xi’s appointment to a third term? Kirby said: “We’re still working, again at the staff level, to see if that can happen.”
This seems a bit tenuous for what would be one of the most important summits of the year, leaving barely enough time to piece together readouts that will school us, again, in the importance of China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and America’s commitment to strengthening democratic governance around the world.
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For many, tired readouts are better than a silence that leaves us wondering when missiles might start flying. The implication is that a face-to-face meeting might somehow work better to avert war and address our climate crisis than Biden’s five summits with Xi via phone or video link.
We might wonder how this could be, given that Beijing will not acknowledge that Xi’s policies – including the subjugation of Muslims to a mass “de-extremification” programme – have anything to do with the fraught state of relations between China and much of the West. And Beijing also believes the ball is in Washington’s court when it comes to what is needed to restore any semblance of Sino-US cooperation.
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The Biden administration, meanwhile, can’t get its story straight with respect to Washington’s one-China policy, the issue that is always at the top of Beijing’s agenda. The US president can’t pledge to protect Taiwan from a military attack by the People’s Liberation Army and simultaneously insist that the policy hasn’t changed.
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Biden in UN speech slams China over nuclear arsenal, Xinjiang but says US ‘not seeking conflict’
Biden in UN speech slams China over nuclear arsenal, Xinjiang but says US ‘not seeking conflict’
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