When President Biden meets Chinese President Xi Jinping Wednesday in California, its primary objective will be simple: find a way to prevent increasingly fierce competition with China from tipping into conflict.
For two leaders who agreed on very little as their nations engaged in their worst relations in four decades, clues were left as to how they would attempt to reach a semblance of agreement. A senior administration official said they should reach the outline of a deal that would commit Beijing to fentanyl regulatory components, the drug that caused a devastating opioid epidemic in the United States. But China has made similar commitments before.
They are expected to announce the creation of a new forum to discuss how to keep artificial intelligence programs out of nuclear command and control – at the same time that the United States is denying China advanced chips that it needs to develop and train AI programs. And they will likely discuss resuming military-to-military communications, which China shut down after then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan last year.
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Mr. Biden arrived in San Francisco on Tuesday with the city locked down for the summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, known as APEC, a group of 21 countries that border the Pacific Ocean. Mr. Biden is scheduled to meet Mr. Xi on Wednesday morning, and in the afternoon he plans to hold a news conference.
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The interactions between the two leaders when they meet at the Filoli Estate, a historic house with garden just northwest of the Stanford campus, were carefully choreographed. But many thorny issues remain, including ones that some of Mr. Biden’s aides have said he intends to raise, such as the wars in Ukraine and Gaza and the upcoming elections in Taiwan, a self-governing island that China claims. like his.
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Administration officials have tried to lower expectations for the kind of concrete commitments that emerge from such summits, saying that simply having the leaders of the world’s two largest economies and most powerful militaries communicating again is in itself a sign of progress. .
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At a fundraiser on Tuesday, Mr. Biden suggested that economic headwinds in China, as well as his administration’s work to build partnerships in the Indo-Pacific region, had brought Mr. Xi to the negotiating table . “President Xi is yet another example of how the restoration of American leadership in the world is coming to fruition,” Mr. Biden said. “They’re in real trouble, folks.”
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No joint statement will be issued Wednesday: U.S. officials say each government will provide its own account of the discussions.
