WASHINGTON — President Biden will meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping next month at an international summit in San Francisco, the White House confirmed Tuesday.
It will be Biden’s second in-person visit with Xi as president — after a meeting last year in Bali — and the Chinese leader’s first trip to the United States since he visited former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in 2017.
“It’s happening,” press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said at the regular White House briefing Friday. “It’s going to be in San Francisco.”
The Biden administration had previously said that it was working toward a meeting with Xi at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit that’s happening Nov. 11-17.
China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said at a Monday press conference that it’s possible Xi would call off the trip.
“I want to stress that it won’t be plain sailing to San Francisco, nor can we leave it to autopilot to get us there,” Wang said. “Both sides need to earnestly return to what was agreed in Bali, act on the common understandings of the two presidents, rise above disruptions, overcome obstacles, expand common understandings and accumulate outcomes.”
Biden frequently reminisces about traveling with Xi during his eight-year vice presidency and routinely says that his priority is ensuring that “competition” in US-China relations doesn’t turn into “conflict.”
Republican critics routinely fault Biden for failing to take a stronger stance in pressuring Xi on issues such as stopping Chinese exports of illicit fentanyl, which has caused record-high US drug overdose deaths, and being transparent on the origins of COVID-19, which has killed more than 1.1 million Americans.
The president didn’t publicly mention either issue during his opening remarks at the Bali summit.
Biden’s relations with Beijing hit lows over the past year when he referred to Xi as a “dictator” at a June fundraiser and following the February shoot-down of a Chinese spy balloon off the coast of South Carolina after it traversed the continental United States.
House Republicans last month launched an impeachment inquiry into Biden’s role in his son Hunter Biden and brother James Biden’s foreign business dealings, including a pair of ventures with Chinese government-linked companies that resulted in millions of dollars of income to the first family.
Biden met with his relatives’ partners in both Chinese government-linked ventures and at one point was penciled in for a 10% cut in a venture that subsequently netted his son and brother about $6.1 million.
House investigators recently acquired James and Hunter Biden’s bank records using subpoenas and are investigating whether the president received any foreign government-linked income.
Trump in 2017 hosted Xi at his club in Palm Beach, Fla., and said that he projected strength by ordering airstrikes on Syria while they shared the “most beautiful piece of chocolate cake.”
Trump later waged a tariffs-drive trade war against China in a bid to force a new trade deal that improved US economic standing. That effort was disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, which emerged in Wuhan, China, after possibly leaking from a lab doing risky research.
Biden thus far has kept in place Trump’s tariffs on Chinese goods.