President Joe Biden personally greeted his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping for the first time since taking office, kicking off high-stakes talks whose results could ripple around the world.
Biden and Xi walked toward each other from opposite sides of a hotel lobby and shook hands in front of a row of U.S. and Chinese flags shortly after 5:30 p.m. local time. They smiled for the cameras and Xi – through a translator – appeared to say: “Nice to see you.”
“As leaders of our two nations, we share the responsibility, in my view, to show that China and the United States can manage our differences, prevent competition from turning into anything approaching conflict, and find ways to work together on urgent global issues that require our mutual cooperation,” Biden said as the talks began.
“The world expects, I believe, China and the United States to play a key role in addressing global challenges,” he said.
The two leaders’ talks on Monday may last only a few hours, but they could have ramifications for months or even years as the world’s biggest economies turn toward increasingly hostile relations.
The moments spent together on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit here will represent only a fraction of the time the two men have been in each other’s company since 2011. Biden claimed that as vice president, he spent north of 70 hours with Xi and traveled 17,000 miles with him across China and the United States – both exaggerations, but still reflective of a relationship that is now perhaps the most important on the planet.
Biden hopes coming face-to-face again after nearly two years of communicating only by phone and video conference may yield a more strategically valuable result, even if he enters the talks with little expectation that they will be able to produce anything concrete.
“I know Xi Jinping. I’ve spent more time with him than any other world leader,” Biden told reporters a day before his meeting, using another oft-cited — if disputed — statistic. “I know him well. He knows me. We have very little misunderstanding.”
It’s not unusual for Biden to point to the two leaders’ long-standing acquaintanceship. But for all the times they met when each was serving as vice president, their meeting Monday comes at a particularly low moment in US-China relations.
Relations have deteriorated rapidly amid economic disputes and an increasingly militarized standoff over Taiwan. The tensions have led to a decline in cooperation in areas where the two countries once shared interests, such as combating climate change and curbing North Korea’s nuclear program.
In a national security strategy document released last month, Biden for the first time identified China as “America’s most consequential geopolitical challenge” and wrote that the country was “the only competitor intent on reshaping the international order and, increasingly and more, the economic, diplomatic, military and technological power to advance this goal.”
There was almost no expectation among American officials that any of these issues could be resolved simply by getting Biden and Xi in the same room. The prospect of a joint statement to be released later was seen as a non-starter.
Simply organizing the meeting itself required US and Chinese officials to establish lines of communication after Beijing furiously cut most channels following House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan over the summer.
“Every issue related to this meeting, from the phone calls to the logistics, has been very carefully considered, negotiated and engaged between the two sides,” a senior US administration official said.
Monday’s meeting was scheduled ahead of Pelosi’s trip, and talks have continued between US and Chinese officials despite Beijing’s anger. The process was “serious, very sustained and professional in the best traditions of US-China diplomacy,” the official said.
A second official acknowledged that talks to set up the meeting were not always friendly.
“I won’t say the talks weren’t contentious because obviously there are many areas where we have differences and challenges,” the official said. “The dozens of hours we’ve spent talking to our Chinese counterparts have certainly brought up many of these issues.”
For his part, Biden takes meetings like this “incredibly seriously” and reads extensively beforehand. In meetings with advisors, he faces various scenarios of how the meeting might go.
“It goes ‘if this happens, then we have to handle it this way,'” the first official said. “He understands that this is, in many ways, the most important bilateral relationship. And it’s his responsibility to manage it well and he takes it very, very seriously.”
Officials said at Monday’s meeting they expected senior Biden advisers to accompany him as part of his official delegation. And they said they expected Xi to be similarly surrounded by top aides, though the U.S. team entered the meeting expecting to see some new faces from the Chinese side amid an ongoing transition in Xi’s inner circle.
Biden aides have not put a time limit on the meeting, although Jake Sullivan, the US national security adviser, said he expected the talks to last “a couple of hours” but could be longer.
“It is a meeting on the sidelines of an international summit. So it’s not in itself a kind of summit where they meet in a third country or in Washington and Beijing,” he said. “So we haven’t put a time limit on the conversation.”
Sullivan said Biden would be “totally blunt and direct” in the meeting and expected Xi to be equally candid in return.
The biggest interest for Biden and his aides is to build some level of understanding with Xi about where the administration sees the relationship with China and learn from him how he sees ties with the United States going forward.
The White House used the phrase “building a floor” to describe the goal of the talks, suggesting that Biden hopes to stop further deterioration in relations and that he sees potential for improvement.
“We just have to figure out where the red lines are and what are the most important things for each of us going forward in the next two years,” Biden told reporters Sunday in Cambodia, where he was participating in summits with Asian leaders before traveling in Bali.
Speaking to a small group of reporters in Bali ahead of Monday’s meeting with Biden, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen suggested the face-to-face was meant to stabilize an escalating relationship and hoped it would lay the groundwork for “intensive” bilateral economic engagement .
“What I very much hope is that as a result of the President’s bilateral role with President Xi today, we will engage in more intensive conversations in the future with our Chinese counterparts about the Chinese economy, global macroeconomic outcomes and how the policies in the US and China affect these results.”
For Xi, the trip to Bali also marks his first trip abroad since the start of the Covid pandemic, which has prompted the Chinese government to impose strict restrictions and draconian restrictions. Xi’s re-emergence on the physical world stage also comes after China’s Communist Party congress in Beijing secured a third term as its no-nonsense leader.
Even a week ago, most inside the White House expected Biden to enter the talks comparatively weakened by Democratic losses in the midterm elections. But the better-than-expected results for Democrats left the president feeling like he was entering meetings this week with the wind at his back, according to top aides.
“I know I’m coming in stronger, but I don’t need to,” Biden said of his own improved political fortunes on Saturday.
US officials previewing the meeting stressed that the Biden administration does not want to come out of it with specific “deliverables”, including a joint statement listing areas of potential cooperation. Rather, the setting is intended to provide both Biden and Xi with an important opportunity to better share their respective countries’ goals and perspectives.
“Xi is not an enigma to President Biden,” a senior administration official told CNN. “He knows him. And he is mindful of where Xi is trying to lead China. He sees China as a competitor and feels confident that the US can win this competition.”
China’s isolation since the pandemic, US officials say, has made it relatively difficult in recent years to read Beijing’s intentions abroad, as Xi has refused to travel outside China – but they believe that is all about to change.
“We can expect them to be more dynamic on the world stage,” said senior management. But, they added: “It’s hard to know what it looks like right now.”
Sullivan said this week that replacing pandemic-era video calls with a face-to-face meeting for the first time since Biden took office “brings the conversation to a different level strategically and allows leaders to explore in greater detail what they each see them in terms of their intentions and priorities.”
