Welcome to Foreign Policy’s China Brief.

The highlights this week: The White House confirms Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to the United States later this month, the Smithsonian National Zoo’s giant pandas depart Washington, and another Chinese financial executive faces a corruption investigation.

The White House has officially confirmed Chinese President Xi Jinping’s first visit to the United States since 2017, although the diplomatic details have yet to be hammered out. Xi will attend the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in San Francisco later this month—a long-anticipated appearance, even if the specifics aren’t yet guaranteed.

The APEC summit starts on Nov. 11, but Xi may fly in later; the leaders’ meeting is on Nov. 17. Given events during Xi’s visit to South Africa in August, where he unexpectedly missed an important speech—perhaps after becoming ill in his travels—the Chinese leader may also build an extra day or two in to his U.S. visit. The Chinese Consulate in San Francisco is already organizing diaspora groups to welcome Xi to the city with fanfare.

Xi will meet U.S. President Joe Biden on the sidelines of the APEC summit, which will mark their first time together in person since a relatively amiable meeting in Bali, Indonesia, during the G-20 summit a year ago. The U.S.-China relationship was already bad then, but it suffered in the months afterward—especially during the spy balloon crisis. The Biden administration has since engaged in a lot of diplomatic repair work, with mixed reception in China.

What does each side want out of the Xi-Biden meeting? China’s priority is likely its stumbling economy. Geopolitical tensions manifest in China as xenophobic crackdowns on foreign businesses and in the United States as growing restraints on technology exports to China; the situation has made U.S. firms increasingly wary of doing business in China. That isn’t the main burden on the Chinese economy—a collapsing real estate market and a local government debt crisis are—but any relief helps.

The United States will prioritize security talks, focusing on nuclear arms control and military-to-military communication. U.S. diplomats fear that a more confrontational attitude toward China, including breaking off some channels due to tensions over Taiwan, could led to a clash neither side wants. The frequency of near-misses both at sea and in the air of late has augmented those concerns, especially given continuing tensions around Philippine naval activity in the South China Sea.

China has an obvious interest in avoiding an accidental war with the United States, but aggressive nationalism is still de rigueur in Chinese military and security circles, and backing down is hard. One working model here for both Beijing and Washington may be China’s restored relationship with Australia, where a change of government allowed for a reset.

After a quarrel sparked by Australia’s measures against Chinese political interference and a 2020 call for an investigation into the origins of COVID-19, China targeted Australia with an economic coercion campaign similar to those it used against Japan, South Korea, Lithuania, Norway, and others. But the Australian economy shrugged off Chinese hostility as the country diversified its soaring exports; the coercion campaign failed.

China has since backed down from its bans on Australian coal and other imports, as well as releasing Australian journalist Cheng Lei, who was detained on national security charges in August 2020, at the nadir of relations. A recent visit to China by Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was full of smiles and new agreements. It seems like an Australian victory, although the Australian government also put behind-the-scenes pressure on both Australian intelligence and strategy think tanks to go a little softer on Beijing.

Yet Canberra is in a strikingly different geopolitical position from the United States. As fierce as Australian domestic politics can be, it does not compare to the allegations thrown around Washington about politicians’ supposedly treacherous connections to Beijing. Nor does Australia occupy anything close to the U.S. place in the Chinese public psyche. The conflicts between China and the United States aren’t going away, even if they are managed more carefully.

Pandas depart Washington. As Xi prepares to arrive in the United States, more beloved figures of Chinese diplomacy have left Washington: the Smithsonian National Zoo’s giant pandas. First brought to the United States in 1972, the animals—always technically on loan from China—represented a hope for friendship between the two countries that now seems distant.

China has long employed panda diplomacy as part of a softer approach to the world than the so-called wolf warrior diplomacy that has come to dominate under Xi, but by next year there may be no pandas left in any U.S. zoos (and possibly Australian ones). The panda has also become part of China’s self-image, even representing the country in its own domestic media—sometimes as strong, powerful, and resistant.

However, the association of the hapless bear and the Chinese nation is recent: The rare panda was basically absent from the popular consciousness before the 20th century and not often depicted in art. The arrival of the panda Chi-Chi at the London Zoo in 1958 brought the animals global attention, and Beijing picked up on it—along with the World Wildlife Fund’s adoption of the panda as a symbol of environmental protection in 1961.

A quiet funeral. Former Chinese Premier Li Keqiang’s funeral passed without incident, thanks in part to restrictions on mourning. (As I noted last week, he also wasn’t a particularly popular figure in the first place.) Nevertheless, Li seems to have become a temporary symbol for Chinese people still holding out hope that the country can return to the days of economic and perhaps even political reform, since he was seen as a more technocratic figure than Xi.

There remains some skepticism about the claim that Li died of a heart attack—perhaps reflective of how much China’s urban upper-middle class has come to distrust the Chinese Communist Party’s word.

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Executive disappearances. This week, Chinese authorities opened a corruption investigation into Zhang Hongli (also known as Lee Zhang), a former executive vice president at the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, one of the country’s largest state banks. He is just one in a series of financial figures to be brought down as part of sector-wide investigations in the last two years.

With experience at Goldman Sachs, Zhang was once a rising star in the industry who played a key role in building dubious links with foreign financial institutions and was close to the family of former Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao. (Wen’s billionaire wife, Zhang Peili, built a small empire of her own while her husband was in power.)

Meanwhile, Chen Shaojie, the head of a major gaming platform, was reportedly disappeared by authorities a few weeks ago. It’s common for business figures to be detained for weeks or longer, such as the still-missing banking executive Bao Fan. Such measures can reflect party intimidation of a sector, genuine investigations, or officials’ attempts to seize control of businesses.

Gallup leaves China. The polling and consultancy group Gallup has become the latest foreign firm to leave China, under pressure from authorities who seem increasingly intolerant of independent investigation of Chinese public opinion. As global opinion of China has declined, foreign polling firms have come under attack from Chinese media.

That is a big problem. Chinese officials’ own grasp of what’s happening in China is often weak, and public opinion is especially hard to gauge in a heavily censored and politically threatening environment. The more independent investigation gets shut down, the less the world knows.