President Joe Biden will meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping next Wednesday in the San Francisco Bay Area on the sidelines of the Indo-Pacific forum, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation.
The United States's relationship with the Chinese Communist Party, the importance of open lines of communication, and managing the competition responsibly, in addition to "a range of regional global and transnational issues," will all be on the agenda, according to senior administration officials.
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"Last year, we put in new rules on outbound and investment and updated our export controls on semiconductors and semiconductor manufacturing equipment," one official told reporters on Thursday. "We've taken actions against [People's Republic of China] entities involved in human rights abuses, forced labor, nonproliferation, and supporting Russia's war in Ukraine, and continue to uphold freedom of navigation in the region by flying, sailing, and operating wherever international law allows."
"We also believe that intense competition requires and demands intense diplomacy to manage tensions and to prevent competition from verging into conflict or confrontation," he said. "We know efforts to shape or reform China over several decades have failed, but we expect China to be around and to be a major player on the world stage for the rest of our lifetimes."
Arms control, maritime matters, as well as macroeconomics and debt, have been discussed during the last eight months since a Chinese spy balloon flew over the U.S. as the two countries tried "to restore diplomatic interaction," per administration officials.
"The balloon comes up often in the context of the need for communications between our two sites," one official said. "The balloon episode underscored the difficulty we had at the time to be able to establish high-level, consequential communications with Beijing, and we've made that case persistently and consistently."
"In every conversation, we've had cross-strait issues absolutely come up. If we look toward next year, both the Taiwan election, the presidential transition, and, of course, our own election, could make this quite a bumpy year," a second official added.
While the officials sought to manage expectations regarding tangible deliverables, Biden and Xi are additionally expected to talk about Israel's war against Hamas, climate, and narcotics amid three U.S. citizens being detained in China.
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"The president will underscore our desire for China to make clear, in its burgeoning relationship with Iran, that it is essential that Iran not seek to escalate or spread violence in the Middle East and to warn, quite clearly, that if Iran undertakes provocative actions anywhere that the United States is prepared to respond and respond promptly," one official said.
The administration officials, too, contended Biden would come into this meeting from a position of strength, citing economic indicators, infrastructure investments, and stronger alliances and partnerships, particularly with Japan and South Korea, compared to when the president last met last year on the sidelines of the G20 leaders' summit in Bali, Indonesia. This will be the pair's seventh conversation during Biden's presidency but only their second in-person meeting.