Xi and Biden are miles apart
San Francisco is cleaning up for this week’s Apec Summit. A city that is currently struggling to put its best foot forward is trying to look – as Prue Leith puts it on Bake Off – as neat as a pin.
The gathering here of 21 nations to discuss the future of the Indo-Pacific – the largest international event in the city for 80 years – will be largely overshadowed by Wednesday’s bilateral meeting between US President Joe Biden and President Xi Jinping of China. They will come face-to-face for the first time since their three-hour encounter on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Bali last November.
The global stakes for their conversation could not be higher. That it has taken a full year of delicate and intense negotiations to make the meeting possible is testament to the tensions that have torpedoed the bilateral relationship.
Both sides emerged from last year’s Bali meeting hoping that ice between the two countries had been broken, but within weeks the US-China relationship was firmly back in the freezer.
The primary cause of the derailment: Biden’s February order to shoot down a Chinese balloon that the US now admits was not engaged in espionage activities against America. The overreaction of both countries doomed bilateral discussions for the best part of a year.
The agenda is vast, and if all goes well, the meeting could last for several hours. Disagreements over Gaza and Ukraine will serve as the backdrop for a superpower meeting that may struggle to make much headway across a range of issues.
On the front burner, Chinese anxieties about America’s developing relationship with Taiwan ahead of January’s crucial elections on the island.
Xi is expected to test Biden’s commitment to the “one China policy” that recognises only the government in Beijing and deems Taiwan to be part of China.
There may be more success in the area of military-to-military co-operation, but the bar couldn’t be much lower. After the balloon incident, all routine communications between the two militaries ceased.
Restoring the crisis hotline to mitigate the growing risk of Chinese and American fighter jets colliding over the South China Sea is seen as increasingly urgent. Scrubbed meetings between the two nations’ militaries could also be put back on the 2024 calendar.
If Xi is hoping to persuade Biden to ease his sanctions on Chinese technology, he is likely to be disappointed. Biden’s approach towards tech corporations, coupled with his determination to ban US investments in Chinese computer chips, is even more aggressive than the policies pursued by Trump.
Biden wants America to benefit by building its own semiconductor manufacturing capacity, and all the summitry in the world won’t dissuade him from that.
America’s fentanyl crisis can be witnessed a stone’s throw from the Apec gathering. Despite the authorities’ best efforts to clean up the city centre, delegates may wander past homeless San Franciscans, many of them fentanyl addicts. Biden wants Xi’s help cracking down on China-based drug traffickers. It’s unclear whether the Chinese leader is willing to provide it.
Climate change is one area where the two sides may be able to accentuate the positive. Climate envoy John Kerry hailed recent talks as reaching “common ground”, and Chinese officials said the two countries will now “jointly push for the success” of COP28 in Dubai at the end of the month.
If Wednesday’s meeting serves as the start of regular, ongoing communication between the US and Chinese governments, then the other Apec leaders may conclude it was worth it, even if Biden and Xi completely overshadow them.
