US President Joe Biden will meet his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, in Peru on Saturday for the last of three in-person sit-downs between the leaders during the US president's term in office, according to senior administration officials.
Both leaders will be in Lima for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum. They last saw each other in person a year ago at the same summit when Biden hosted Xi outside of San Francisco.
With his term ending, Biden will have significantly diminished power when he sits across from Xi, while the Chinese leader likely is already focused on dealing with Republican President-elect Donald Trump.
Trump for his second term in the White House has threatened to double down on his trade war with China, with plans to impose steep tariffs on all imports from the country.
The senior Biden administration officials, who requested anonymity to discuss the upcoming meeting, declined to comment when asked whether the US president planned to mention Trump or his proposed policies in his conversation with Xi. They also referred to Trump's transition team any questions on whether the incoming president and his advisers have been receiving - or requested - classified intelligence briefings on China.
US President Joe Biden
Presidential transitions are "uniquely consequential moments in geopolitics" and Biden will emphasize with Xi the need to maintain "stability, clarity, predictability" in the US-China relationship during this time, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said in a separate briefing with reporters Wednesday. He called competition with China "a paramount priority" for the next administration.
Unlike the Biden-Xi meeting in 2023, the focus this time will be less on delivering outcomes or building on progress they have made. Biden is instead expected to use their last face-to-face encounter as a check-in that gives him the chance to emphasize issues of concern.
Among them is China's ongoing support for Russia's defense industrial base, which a senior official said is unlikely to stop and therefore a topic that is going to occupy the incoming administration as well.
Still, Biden will be at pains to point out successes of his strategy of "intense diplomacy" with China, and progress on the three achievements the White House cited out of the leaders' last meeting in California: on military-to-military communications, counter-narcotics efforts and artificial intelligence - each an area where the US has sought to at east enhance dialogue with Chinese officials to limit misunderstanding and instability.
For Beijing, this might be an opportunity to take stock of bilateral ties, which have stabilized over the past year. The Xi-Biden meeting in 2023 has led to a flurry of diplomatic engagements and the restart of communication channels, helping to ease tensions at a time when the world's No. 2 economy is slowing.
But it may be hard for the momentum to continue. Trump has picked people with track records of being harsh on Beijing for key posts in his administration - especially China-sanctioned Marco Rubio as secretary of state, and Mike Waltz as national security adviser. This could bring fresh turbulence to US-China ties.
Alleged Hack
The meeting follows an alleged Chinese hack of American telecommunications networks that the US intelligence community is investigating. US officials believe a Chinese hacking group that Microsoft Corp. dubbed Salt Typhoon may have been inside US telecoms for months and found a route into an access point for court-authorized wiretapping.
The sweeping hack targeted the Trump campaign as well as that of Vice President Kamala Harris, his Democratic general-election rival.
Sullivan on Sunday called it "an absolutely significant attack" in an interview on CBS's Face the Nation and said that Biden brings up cyber-enabled espionage every time he speaks with Xi.
"It's something that the FBI, our Department of Homeland Security, our entire national security enterprise is digging into in a big way," he said. "And of course, it will be on the agenda between every American official and every Chinese official in the weeks ahead."
A senior administration official said Biden would warn Xi about what they cast as reckless attacks against critical US networks and that such actions would only lead to further decoupling from Chinese-origin technology.
The two superpowers continue to spar over issues ranging from Taiwan to Ukraine to the South China Sea. The Biden administration has also imposed technology restrictions and a ban on Chinese electric vehicles, as well as added more tariffs to the existing ones they inherited from the first Trump term.
The Biden team often touts its efforts to keep open channels of communication, including via Sullivan and his counterpart Wang Yi, that have helped steady ties.
The US official had one piece of unsolicited advice: Whatever the next administration decides to do, they will need to find ways to manage the relationship somehow.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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