Joe Biden and Xi Jinping to speak by phone amid effort to boost US-China relations
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President Joe Biden and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping will speak by telephone in “the coming weeks”, the White House said on Wednesday, following meetings between top US and Chinese officials in Beijing.
The announcement came after US national security adviser Jake Sullivan and Wang Yi, China’s top foreign policy official, held two days of talks in Beijing as part of a “strategic channel” created to stabilise relations and to enable discussions about sensitive issues such as Taiwan.
Ahead of Sullivan’s meeting in Beijing, one US official said the two leaders could meet once more before Biden leaves office — an option that has become feasible since he withdrew from this year’s presidential race. They could meet at the Apec forum in Peru or the G20 in Brazil, both in November after the US election.
Sullivan had held four meetings with Wang since May 2023, in Vienna, Malta, Washington and Bangkok. The channel has been kept low-profile to allow both sides to have uninterrupted talks on strategic issues.
The White House said they had candid and constructive talks in Beijing on bilateral, regional and global issues.
It said the two sides were planning a call between Admiral Samuel Paparo, head of US Indo-Pacific command, and his counterpart. In San Francisco, Xi agreed to reopen communication channels between the US and Chinese militaries that Beijing shut in 2022 after Nancy Pelosi became the first US House Speaker to visit Taiwan in 25 years.
The White House said the officials discussed progress on agreements reached last November at the Biden-Xi summit in San Francisco — including a Chinese promise to crack down on the export of ingredients for the deadly opioid fentanyl — and also talked about the importance of taking “concrete steps to tackle the climate crisis”.
But Sullivan also stressed that the US would continue to take “actions to prevent advanced US technologies from being used to undermine our national security, without unduly limiting trade or investment”.
The White House said Sullivan stressed the importance of “maintaining peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait”, raised concerns about China’s support for Russia’s defence industrial base and its “destabilising actions against lawful Philippine maritime operations in the South China Sea”.
Some experts think Sullivan may meet Xi on Thursday since Wang met Biden when he visited Washington last October ahead of the summit.
China’s state media said Sullivan and Wang discussed “a new round of interaction between the two heads of state in the near future”.
Xinhua cited Wang as saying that Beijing wanted world peace and called on the US not to see China through a “template of a strong country that must dominate”. Sullivan has used their channel to tell China that the two countries can be in a competition but also co-operate at the same time.
Wang warned that Taiwanese independence was “the biggest risk to peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait”, according to Xinhua.
He said China would also defend its “sovereignty” over South China Sea islands and that the US should not support the Philippines’ “infringing actions” in the area, where there have been clashes over Manila’s attempts to resupply troops in a stranded ship on the Second Thomas Shoal. An international tribunal has rejected Beijing’s claims of sovereignty.