APEC Summit: Biden’s Bittersweet Meeting with Xi Jinping
President Biden (left) greets Premier Xi Jinping (right) at APEC Summit Source: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters
On Wednesday, Nov. 15, US President Joe Biden hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Filoli Estate in San Francisco for a four hour one-on-one discussion. The meeting comes amidst the backdrop of this year’s Asian-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Summit where leaders from twenty-one Asian-Pacific nations gather to discuss economic cooperation and trade integration. The meeting was an especially significant one as the meeting followed a period of deteriorating Sino-American relations in hopes of returning cordiality to the relationship.
Sino-American relations have been shaky since President Trump initiated a trade war with China back in 2018. When President Biden took office in 2020, many believed the US would return to a softer stance on China, something which had been the status quo since President Nixon established relations with Chinese President Mao Zedong in 1972.
However, instead of returning to friendly relations with the Chinese, President Biden has so far maintained President Trump's anti-China rhetoric and policy, upholding the US domestic ban of Chinese telecom giant Huawei and implementing new bans on sensitive technology being exported to China.
Tensions reached a boiling point when then Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan in 2022, causing China to sever military-to-military communications, a link which is vital to the avoidance of accidental miscues between the two nations’ militaries. US diplomats were set to meet with their Chinese counterparts earlier this year in January. However, talks were abruptly canceled after multiple Chinese spy balloons surfaced in US airspace, extending the hostilities between the two nations until now.
A sign advertising the APEC Summit in San Francisco, California Source: Carlos Barria/Reuters
The meeting was the first between the two leaders since a minor greeting in Bali, Indonesia one year ago. However, both leaders have met numerous times before they became Presidents; “I’ve been meeting with President Xi since both of us were vice president over 10 years ago” President Biden remarked.
Although many anticipated the two leaders to discuss the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, given the timing of the meeting and how the US has shown strong support for the Israeli government whilst the Chinese have historically sided with the Palestinians, little progress was made on the issue. The majority of the meeting consisted of talks regarding easing hostilities between the two nations directly, addressing the fentanyl crisis in the US, and Taiwan.
The meeting yielded a mixed bag of results for each side. President Xi agreed to re-engage with the US military, reestablishing the military-to-military communications which were cut off after Speaker Pelosi’s visit. The two leaders also gave promises to work together to help tackle the fentanyl crisis in the US, as most Fentanyl and Fentanyl ingredients are shipped into the US via China.
Lastly, the two leaders discussed Taiwan to which little progress, if any, was made. The New York Times reported that President Biden “mentioned the accelerated Chinese military activity around Taiwan” to which President Xi responded by asking “why the United States was arming the island” in the first place, and further, calling for an end to US arms sales to Taiwan.
Regardless of the lack of concrete progress made in the meeting, the talks appeared to end on a positive note. That was until President Biden, while being interviewed by US journalists, referred to President Xi as a “Dictator in the sense that he’s a guy who runs a country that is a Communist country.”
The remark was instantly met with harsh criticism in Beijing and has dampened the bilateral mood regarding the meeting. Although the best characterization of the talks are more bittersweet than beneficial, the meeting is a good first step towards softer Sino-American relations in the future.