President Joe Biden will meet Monday with President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of next week\u2019s Group of 20 Summit in Bali, Indonesia, a face-to-face meeting that comes amid increasingly strained U.S.-China relations, the White House announced Thursday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It will be the first in-person meeting between the leaders of the world\u2019s two biggest economies since Mr. Biden became president in January 2021 and comes weeks after Mr. Xi was awarded a norm-breaking third, five-year term as the Chinese Communist Party leader during the party\u2019s national congress.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a statement the leaders will meet to \u201cdiscuss efforts to maintain and deepen lines of communication between\u201d the two countries and to “responsibly manage competition and work together where our interests align, especially on transnational challenges that affect the international community.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The White House has been working with Chinese officials over the last several weeks to arrange the meeting. Mr. Biden on Wednesday told reporters that he intended to discuss with Mr. Xi growing tensions between Washington and Beijing over the self-ruled island of Taiwan, trade policies, Beijing\u2019s relationship with Russia and more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWhat I want to do with him when we talk is lay out what each of our red lines are and 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,\u201d Mr. Biden said. \u201cAnd determine whether or not they conflict with one another.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the summit, sought to downplay expectations for the meeting , telling reporters on Thursday that there was no joint communique or deliverables anticipated from the sit-down. Rather, the official said, Mr. Biden aimed to build a \u201cfloor for the relationship.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mr. Biden and Mr. Xi traveled together in the U.S. and China in 2011 and 2012 when both leaders were serving as their respective countries’ vice presidents, and they have held five phone or video calls since Mr. Biden became President in January 2021. But the U.S.-China relationship has become far more complicated since those getting-to-know-you talks in Washington and on the Tibetan plateau a decade ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As President, Mr. Biden has repeatedly taken China to task for human rights abuses against the Uyghur people and other ethnic minorities, Beijing\u2019s crackdowns on democracy activists in Hong Kong, coercive trade practices, military provocations against self-ruled Taiwan and differences over Russia\u2019s prosecution of its war against Ukraine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Weeks before Vladimir Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine, the Russian president met with Mr. Xi in Beijing and the two issued a memorandum expressing hopes of a \u201cno limits\u201d relationship for their nations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
China has largely refrained from criticizing Russia\u2019s war but thus far has held off on supplying Moscow with arms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI don\u2019t think there\u2019s a lot of respect that China has for Russia or Putin,\u201d Mr. Biden said Wednesday. \u201cAnd in fact, they\u2019ve been sort of keeping the distance a little bit.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The leaders were also expected to address U.S. frustrations that Beijing has not used its influence to press North Korea to pull back from conducting provocative missile tests and to abandon its nuclear weapons program. Mr. Biden was set to discuss threats from North Korea with the leaders of South Korea and Japan a day before sitting down with Mr. Xi.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mr. Xi\u2019s government has criticized the Biden administration\u2019s posture toward Taiwan \u2014 which Beijing looks eventually to unify with the communist mainland \u2014 as undermining China\u2019s sovereignty and territorial integrity. The Chinese president also has suggested that Washington wants to stifle Beijing\u2019s growing clout as it tries to overtake the U.S. as the world\u2019s largest economy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tensions over Taiwan have grown since House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan in August.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Biden said that he\u2019s \u201cnot willing to make any fundamental concessions\u201d about the United States\u2019 Taiwan doctrine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Under its \u201cOne China\u201d policy, the United States recognizes the government in Beijing while allowing for informal relations and defense ties with Taipei. It takes a stance of \u201cstrategic ambiguity\u201d toward the defense of Taiwan \u2014 leaving open the question of whether it would respond militarily were the island attacked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mr. Biden caused a stir in Asia in May when at a news conference in Tokyo, said \u201cyes\u201d when asked if he was willing to get involved militarily to defend Taiwan if China invaded. The White House and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin were quick to clarify that there was no change in U.S. policy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Beijing sees official American contact with Taiwan as encouragement to make the island\u2019s decades-old de facto independence permanent, a step U.S. leaders say they don\u2019t support. Ms. Pelosi is the highest-ranking elected American official to visit since then-Speaker Newt Gingrich in 1997.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mr. Xi has stayed close to home throughout the global COVID-19 pandemic, where he has enforced a \u201czero-COVID\u201d policy that has resulted in mass lockdowns that have roiled the global supply chains.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He made his first trip outside China since start of the pandemic in September with a stop in Kazakhstan and then onto Uzbekistan to take part in the eight-nation Shanghai Cooperation Organization with Mr. Putin and other leaders of the Central Asian security group.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
U.S. officials were eager to see how Mr. Xi approaches the meeting after being newly empowered with a third term and consolidating his position as the unquestioned leader of the state, saying they would wait to assess whether that made him more or less likely to seek out areas of cooperation with the U.S.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
They emphasized that party congress results reinforced the importance of direct engagement with Mr. Xi, rather than lower level officials whom they\u2019ve found unable or unwilling to speak for the Chinese leader.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
President Joe Biden will meet Monday with President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of next week\u2019s Group of 20 Summit in Bali, Indonesia, a face-to-face meeting that comes amid increasingly strained U.S.-China relations, the White House announced Thursday. It will be the first in-person meeting between the leaders of the world\u2019s two biggest economies since […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":88653,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-88652","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-international-news","category-top-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dailypunjabtimes.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88652","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dailypunjabtimes.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dailypunjabtimes.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dailypunjabtimes.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dailypunjabtimes.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=88652"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.dailypunjabtimes.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88652\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":88654,"href":"https:\/\/www.dailypunjabtimes.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88652\/revisions\/88654"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dailypunjabtimes.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/88653"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dailypunjabtimes.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=88652"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dailypunjabtimes.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=88652"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dailypunjabtimes.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=88652"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}