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
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