President Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping are expected to sit for a highly anticipated meeting on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference in the Bay Area on Wednesday \u2014 a meeting that officials hope will ease tensions in the midst of wars raging in Israel and Ukraine.<\/p>\n
The meeting is to take place in San Francisco and will be a setting for \u2018intense diplomacy,\u2019 a senior administration official said.<\/p>\n
The White House says Biden and Xi are expected to discuss the relationship between the United States and China, including the importance of maintaining \u2018open lines of communication.\u2019<\/p>\n
A senior administration official said the two leaders will also discuss \u2018managing competition responsibly\u2019 along with a range of regional, global and transnational issues, including Russia\u2019s war in Ukraine, the Israel-Hamas war, and the growing conflicts in the Middle East.<\/p>\n
\u2018There will be a conversation on North Korea about some of our concerns with respect to the relationship with Russia in Ukraine,\u2019 a senior official said. \u2018I think with respect to the Middle East, I believe that the president will underscore our desire for China to make clear in its burgeoning relationship with Iran 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.\u2019<\/p>\n
The two are also expected to discuss additional \u2018potentially contentious\u2019 topics, including election interference, with Biden planning to warn Xi about potential election influence operations.<\/p>\n
The meeting this week will be the second in-person meeting between Biden and Xi since the beginning of the Biden administration in January 2021, but it will be the \u2018seventh interaction,\u2019 the official said.<\/p>\n
Biden and Xi last met in November 2022 on the sidelines of the\u00a0G20 Summit in Bali, Indonesia,\u00a0where they agreed that more direct communication between U.S. and Chinese leadership was desirable.<\/p>\n
\u2018Both leaders have a longstanding relationship that began when they were both vice presidents,\u2019 the official said. \u2018They have known each other for roughly a dozen years.\u2019<\/p>\n
Officials said that in the last eight months the Biden administration has been working to \u2018restore diplomatic interaction.\u2019 In that time, White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan met with Chinese Director Wang Yi three times; Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo have traveled to Beijing; and China has sent its vice president, foreign minister and other senior officials to the United States for meetings.<\/p>\n
\u2018Over the last nearly three years, the administration surveyed the strategic landscape, assessed the challenge and took a series of purposeful strategic steps both at home and abroad in a diplomatic context that we think is sustaining,\u2019 the official said.<\/p>\n
But the meeting between Biden and Xi on Wednesday comes at a critical time, one that Biden administration officials say is ripe for \u2018high-level diplomacy.\u2019<\/p>\n
The Biden administration says its approach is \u2018steady and consistent.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u2018We\u2019re not stepping back from our interests and values. We\u2019re moving forward on them,\u2019 a senior official said while noting that they are \u2018clear-eyed about this.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u2018We also believe that intense competition requires and demands intense diplomacy to manage tensions and to prevent competition from verging into conflict or confrontation,\u2019 an official said. \u2018We expect China to be around and to be a major player on the world stage for the rest of our lifetimes.\u2019<\/p>\n
Biden administration senior officials say that the meeting keeps in line with the United States\u2019 \u2018decades of experience\u2019 in talking to and \u2018working with competitors when our interests call for it.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u2018And this meeting with President Xi is in keeping with that tradition in American statecraft,\u2019 an official said. \u2018And at this meeting, I think you can expect us to draw on that experience as we both stabilize the relationship and deliver in material, tangible ways for the American people.\u2019<\/p>\n
The goal of the meeting, an official said, is not to return with \u2018deliverables\u2019 but rather to ensure the administration is \u2018managing the competition, preventing the downside risk of conflict and ensuring channels of communication are open.\u2019<\/p>\n
One critical line of discussion, officials said, will be about open lines of communication between U.S. and Chinese military channels \u2014 especially in light of the Chinese surveillance balloon that traversed the continental United States in February.<\/p>\n
\u2018This is absolutely critical. And when we\u2019re talking about managing risks, about avoiding conflict, this is exactly the sort of communication we need to be having, both at senior levels of our two militaries but also operator to operator,\u2019 the official said. \u2018The balloon comes up often in the context of the need for communications between our two sides. And I think the balloon episode underscored the difficulty we had at the time to be able to establish high-level, consequential communications with Beijing.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u2018We\u2019ve made that case persistently and consistently,\u2019 the official continued. \u2018I think you can expect the president to raise the broad parameters of \u2018mil to mil\u2019 engagement with President Xi next week.\u2019<\/p>\n
The official said that Biden and administration officials have raised the issue in \u2018every encounter.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u2018I think it is fair to say that the Chinese have been reluctant. And so the president is going to press assertively next week,\u2019 the official said.<\/p>\n\n
President Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping are expected to sit for a highly anticipated meeting on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference in the Bay Area on Wednesday \u2014 a meeting that officials hope will ease tensions in the midst of wars raging in Israel and Ukraine. The meeting is to take <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":11662,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-11661","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-politics"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11661","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11661"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11661\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11662"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11661"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11661"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11661"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}