Renew: 11/10/2023 16:18
Issued by: 10/11/2023, 14:15

Washington – American President Joe Biden will hold talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping in San Francisco next Wednesday in an effort to “stabilize” mutual relations, American officials told media. In particular, according to them, the meeting should discuss trade relations, Taiwan, the war in Ukraine and the crisis in the Middle East, according to information provided by the world press agency. There are deep differences of opinion between Washington and Beijing on a number of points presented.

The leaders of the two countries with the largest economies in the world will meet again a year after the last meeting which took place in Indonesia last year. In California, they will follow up this event with talks on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit, which starts on Saturday.

China’s Foreign Ministry said Xi will be in the United States from November 14 to 17, according to Reuters. The statement confirmed the meeting with Biden, but did not detail the specific topic.

There has been speculation about a new meeting for weeks, but the date was only confirmed today. The summit follows a series of talks between Chinese and American officials, who discussed possible joint action on nuclear weapons this week for the first time in years. In late October, Biden spoke with China’s top diplomat Wang Yi in Washington, and last weekend US climate commissioner John Kerry and his Chinese counterpart Xie Chenchua held talks.

When announcing the date of the summit, the two US officials listed various topics that Biden wanted to raise, ranging from long-term tensions in economic relations, the fight against climate change, to “regional and global issues”. The American president, according to Washington’s statement, will ask Beijing “as part of developing relations with Iran” to prevent Tehran from inciting conflict in the Middle East. With regard to Ukraine, America has long called on China not to develop a military partnership with Russia.

The meeting in San Francisco is not expected to produce any major announcements or resolve the long-standing dispute, according to the AP. Instead, one American official described the importance of the event as Biden wanting to “manage competition, avoid the risk of conflict and ensure that communication channels remain open.”

In their first meeting since the start of Biden’s term, the pair spent nearly three hours together in Bali, where the US president spoke out against Beijing’s “coercive and increasingly aggressive steps” towards Taiwan. China claims the island as one of its provinces, even though it has operated as an independent democracy for decades. Apart from that, Russian aggression in Ukraine or economic competition was also discussed a year ago.

Since then, Biden and Si have not spoken, he wrote daily New York Times (NYT). Relations between the two superpowers have also experienced renewed turbulence, most notably in February, when a balloon flight over American territory that Washington described as part of a large-scale Chinese espionage operation was denied by Beijing. Other diplomatic divisions occurred, for example around US restrictions on technology exports to China, wrote the NYT.

American officials have consistently emphasized that they do not want conflict with China and do not even want to sever economic ties with China. Several officials from the Biden administration have visited China this year, which is also seeking to restore communications between the two countries’ militaries that were disrupted after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan last year.

China’s ambassador to the US, Sie Feng, said this week that Beijing wanted assurances that Washington was not seeking a “new Cold War” and changing “the Chinese system”. According to him, bilateral relations are burdened by a number of challenges and there is still a “long way to go” to stabilize them.

PHOTO United States China Xi Jinping Biden