US President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) are to meet on Wednesday in California for talks on trade, Taiwan and fraught US-Chinese relations in the first engagement in a year between the leaders of the world’s two biggest economies.
The White House has said for weeks that it anticipated Biden and Xi would meet on the sidelines of the APEC summit in San Francisco, but negotiations went down to the eve of the gathering, which started yesterday.
The leaders would discuss the “continued importance of maintaining open lines of communication” and how they “can continue to responsibly manage competition and work together where our interests align, particularly on transnational challenges that affect the international community,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a statement.
Photo: AFP
Two senior Biden administration officials — who earlier briefed reporters on condition of anonymity under ground rules set by the White House — said the leaders would meet in the San Francisco Bay area, but declined to offer further details because of security concerns.
Meanwhile, US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen on Friday insisted that Washington and Beijing had to re-establish “healthy economic relations.”
However, the US would not shy away from taking unilateral action against Chinese firms supplying defense equipment to Russia for its invasion of Ukraine if Beijing failed to take preventative action, she said.
“We do not seek to decouple our economy from China’s,” Yellen told reporters after a two-day meeting with Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng (何立峰) in San Francisco. “This would be damaging to both the US and China and destabilizing to the world.”
“During our discussions, we agreed that in-depth and frank discussions matter, particularly when we disagree,” Yellen said.
She said she had accepted an invitation to visit Beijing next year.
“There is no substitute for in-person diplomacy,” said Yellen, who added that she believed the two laid the groundwork for a productive meeting between Biden and Xi.
The meeting between the leaders is not expected to lead to many, if any, major announcements.
Instead, Biden is looking toward “managing the competition, preventing the downside risk of conflict and ensuring channels of communication are open,” one official said.
The agenda includes no shortage of difficult issues.
Differences in the already complicated US-Chinese relationship have only sharpened in the past year, with Beijing bristling over new US export controls on advanced technology, Biden ordering the shooting down of a Chinese spy balloon and Chinese anger over a stopover in the US by President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) earlier this year, among other issues.
Regarding Taiwan, Biden intends to reaffirm the US wants no change in the “status quo,” one official said.
The officials also said that Biden is determined to restore military-to-military communications that Beijing largely withdrew from after then-US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan in August last year.
Additional reporting by AFP and Reuters
AIR SUPPORT: The Ministry of National Defense thanked the US for the delivery, adding that it was an indicator of the White House’s commitment to the Taiwan Relations Act Deputy Minister of National Defense Po Horng-huei (柏鴻輝) and Representative to the US Alexander Yui on Friday attended a delivery ceremony for the first of Taiwan’s long-awaited 66 F-16C/D Block 70 jets at a Lockheed Martin Corp factory in Greenville, South Carolina. “We are so proud to be the global home of the F-16 and to support Taiwan’s air defense capabilities,” US Representative William Timmons wrote on X, alongside a photograph of Taiwanese and US officials at the event. The F-16C/D Block 70 jets Taiwan ordered have the same capabilities as aircraft that had been upgraded to F-16Vs. The batch of Lockheed Martin
GRIDLOCK: The National Fire Agency’s Special Search and Rescue team is on standby to travel to the countries to help out with the rescue effort A powerful earthquake rocked Myanmar and neighboring Thailand yesterday, killing at least three people in Bangkok and burying dozens when a high-rise building under construction collapsed. Footage shared on social media from Myanmar’s second-largest city showed widespread destruction, raising fears that many were trapped under the rubble or killed. The magnitude 7.7 earthquake, with an epicenter near Mandalay in Myanmar, struck at midday and was followed by a strong magnitude 6.4 aftershock. The extent of death, injury and destruction — especially in Myanmar, which is embroiled in a civil war and where information is tightly controlled at the best of times —
China's military today said it began joint army, navy and rocket force exercises around Taiwan to "serve as a stern warning and powerful deterrent against Taiwanese independence," calling President William Lai (賴清德) a "parasite." The exercises come after Lai called Beijing a "foreign hostile force" last month. More than 10 Chinese military ships approached close to Taiwan's 24 nautical mile (44.4km) contiguous zone this morning and Taiwan sent its own warships to respond, two senior Taiwanese officials said. Taiwan has not yet detected any live fire by the Chinese military so far, one of the officials said. The drills took place after US Secretary
THUGGISH BEHAVIOR: Encouraging people to report independence supporters is another intimidation tactic that threatens cross-strait peace, the state department said China setting up an online system for reporting “Taiwanese independence” advocates is an “irresponsible and reprehensible” act, a US government spokesperson said on Friday. “China’s call for private individuals to report on alleged ‘persecution or suppression’ by supposed ‘Taiwan independence henchmen and accomplices’ is irresponsible and reprehensible,” an unnamed US Department of State spokesperson told the Central News Agency in an e-mail. The move is part of Beijing’s “intimidation campaign” against Taiwan and its supporters, and is “threatening free speech around the world, destabilizing the Indo-Pacific region, and deliberately eroding the cross-strait status quo,” the spokesperson said. The Chinese Communist Party’s “threats
RSS