Conflict avoidance
Joe Biden talks to Xi Jinping but they have little to report
America has decided it needs a line of communication with China at the top
THAT PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN has only just spoken on the phone to his counterpart in Beijing, Xi Jinping, for the second time since taking office in January, is a measure of how far American-Chinese relations have sunk. Mr Biden entered the White House resolved not to seek or to grant an early meeting with Mr Xi. The two men had got to know each other when both were vice-presidents, spending hours in extended conversation, and Mr Biden used to boast about getting to know Mr Xi in a way no other Americans had. But that was during a bygone era of engagement with China, which ended under Donald Trump. Mr Biden was not about to signal that it might return. Instead he sent emissaries to meet Mr Xi’s men both to talk tough and to discuss how to co-operate on critical global issues like climate change.
That approach has not worked. So on September 9th Mr Biden changed tack, initiating a call to Mr Xi that lasted 90 minutes (in Beijing the call took place on the morning of September 10th), their second conversation as heads of state, after one in February. Few details were released, and there was no schedule set for a future meeting or conversation (Mr Xi has not left China since the pandemic began).
The fundamental goal of the call was modest: to open a line of communication at the top. And anything like a normal conversation would have counted as detente. Relations between the two countries, which had reached their most acrimonious point in half a century by the end of Mr Trump’s presidency, have only worsened since.
Mr Xi’s diplomats have pointedly rebuffed Mr Biden’s messengers. In Alaska in March Yang Jiechi, Mr Xi’s most senior diplomat, lectured Antony Blinken, the secretary of state, in front of the cameras. In China in July, state media broke protocol by publishing confrontational remarks made by Xie Feng, the vice-foreign minister, during his meeting with Mr Blinken’s deputy, Wendy Sherman, accusing America of creating an “imaginary enemy”. On September 1st Wang Yi, the foreign minister, told John Kerry, Mr Biden’s senior envoy on climate change, that the rocky relationship between America and China threatened to undermine co-operation. A senior administration official said such meetings were proving fruitless and unsatisfying. Mr Biden’s aides felt that Mr Xi’s underlings were playing to a domestic audience, including, most notably, their boss.
For Mr Biden the solution was to do what he had initially resisted doing, re-establish his personal connection with Mr Xi. A senior administration official said they spent some time recalling their past meetings. They also discussed points of tension, such as cyber-hacking, and areas where they have common interests, like climate change. And underlining just how bad relations are, they “discussed the responsibility of both nations to ensure competition does not veer into conflict”, according to the White House’s official readout.
There may be some political risk for Mr Biden in waxing nostalgic with Mr Xi. Republican presidential aspirants, including Mr Trump, have relentlessly tried to portray Mr Biden as soft on China, citing his personal connection with Mr Xi. It has not stuck because Mr Biden and his aides have been consistently tough on China—tougher, in some ways, than Mr Trump, who was not troubled by authoritarians. The Biden administration has co-ordinated with allies to impose sanctions on China for human-rights abuses and to call out China for state-sponsored hacking.
There is a risk too that in China the call will be portrayed as a “reset” in relations, the sort of language the Biden administration rejects. On September 10th Liu Xin, a presenter for CGTN, a state-owned international broadcaster, tweeted, “China and US in dialogue with each other is in the interest of the whole world”.
It will be difficult to build a basis for substantive co-operation. Mr Biden has been openly cultivating democratic allies in what he has called a “contest with autocrats”. He has secured from Japan and South Korea public expressions of support for Taiwan, a self-governing island which China claims as its own, and with which America has forged closer ties. China’s diplomats may be performatively ornery to please their boss, but analysts say they are also responding rationally to what looks from Beijing like a policy of containment.
Still, at some point the administration will need to work with China on pressing global issues, including Afghanistan, North Korea, Iran and, at a global summit in Glasgow this November, climate change. The Biden administration seems to have concluded that to achieve any breakthroughs, they needed to approach Mr Xi directly. The only person who can do that is Mr Biden.
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