Biden to meet China’s Xi on Monday for Taiwan, Russia talks

President Joe Biden will meet Monday with President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of next week’s Group of 20 Summit in Bali, Indonesia – a face-to-face meeting that comes amid increasingly strained US-China relations, the White House announced Thursday.

It will be the first in-person meeting between the leaders of the world’s two biggest economies since Biden became president in January 2021, and comes weeks after Xi was awarded a norm-breaking third, five-year term as the Chinese Communist Party leader during the party’s national congress.

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a statement the leaders will meet to “discuss efforts to maintain and deepen lines of communication between” the two countries and to “responsibly manage competition, and work together where our interests align, especially on transnational challenges that affect the international community.”

The White House has been working with Chinese officials over the last several weeks to arrange the meeting. Biden on Wednesday told reporters that he intended to discuss with Xi growing tensions between Washington and Beijing over Taiwan, trade policies, Beijing’s relationship with Russia and more.

“What I want to do with him when we talk is lay out what each of our red lines are, and understand what he believes to be in the critical national interests of China, [and] what I know to be the critical interests of the United States,” Biden said. “And determine whether or not they conflict with one another.”

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Biden and Xi traveled together in the US and China in 2011 and 2012 when both leaders were serving as their respective countries’ vice presidents, and they have held five phone or video calls since Biden became president in January 2021.

The leaders were also expected to address US frustrations that Beijing has not used its influence to press North Korea to pull back from conducting provocative missile tests, and to abandon its nuclear weapons program. Biden was set to discuss threats from North Korea with the leaders of South Korea and Japan a day before sitting down with Xi.

Xi has stayed close to home throughout the global Covid-19 pandemic, where he has enforced a “zero-Covid” policy that has resulted in mass lock-downs that have roiled the global supply chains.

He made his first trip outside China since start of the pandemic in September with a stop in Kazakhstan, and then onto Uzbekistan to take part in the eight-nation Shanghai Cooperation Organisation with Putin and other leaders of the Central Asian security group.

US officials were eager to see how Xi approaches the meeting after being newly empowered with a third term, and consolidating his position as the unquestioned leader of the state, saying they would wait to assess whether that made him more or less likely to seek out areas of cooperation with the US.

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