US President Joe Biden and China’s Xi Jinping to meet next week | 5 things to know

US President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping are all set to hold a meeting in California on Wednesday, November 15, news agency Associated Press reported on Friday. 

The White House said earlier that it anticipated Biden and Xi would meet on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit (APEC) in San Francisco. However, the negotiations went down to the eve of the gathering, which kicks off Saturday, the report said.

In a statement Friday, China's foreign ministry said President Xi Xinjing would attend APEC from Tuesday to November 17 at Biden's invitation. He would also participate in the US-China summit. The report quoted Biden administration officials as saying that they believed it would be Xi's first visit to San Francisco since he was a young Communist Party leader.

What would Biden and Xi discuss? 5 things to know

1.Trade, Taiwan and managing fraught US-Chinese relations are likely to feature in the talks between the two world leaders. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was quoted in a statement as saying that the leaders would discuss the “continued importance of maintaining open lines of communication”. 

2. Biden and Xi might also discuss how they “can continue to responsibly manage competition and work together where our interests align, particularly on transnational challenges that affect the international community.”.

3. Instead, one Biden administration official said, Biden is looking toward “managing the competition, preventing the downside risk of conflict and ensuring channels of communication are open.” 

4. Biden will also likely press Xi on using China's influence on North Korea. This comes amid heightened anxiety over an increased pace of ballistic missile tests by North Korea. Moreover, Pyongyang has reportedly been providing munitions to Russia for its war in Ukraine.

5. Biden is also expected to let Xi know that he would like China to use its burgeoning sway over Iran to make clear that Tehran or its proxies should not take action that could lead to expansion of the Israel-Hamas war. His administration believes the Chinese, a big buyer of Iranian oil, have considerable leverage with Iran, which is a major backer of Hamas.

The AP reported added that the Biden-Xi meeting is not expected to lead to many, if any, major announcements because of their differences.

US- China relationship

The US-Chinese relationship took a hit last year, when Beijing bristled over new US export controls on advanced technology. Biden had also ordered the shooting down of a Chinese spy balloon after it traversed the continental United States. 

Before this, Chin had expressed anger over a stopover in the US by Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen earlier this year. China claims the island as its territory.

Beijing sees official American contact with Taiwan as encouragement to make the island's decades-old de facto independence permanent, a step US leaders say they don't support.

Biden and Xi last met nearly a year ago on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit in Bali, Indonesia. In the nearly three-hour meeting, Biden objected directly to China's ”coercive and increasingly aggressive actions” toward Taiwan. 

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Xi had stressed that "the Taiwan question is at the very core of China's core interests, the bedrock of the political foundation of China-US relations, and the first red line that must not be crossed in China-US relations.”

The two leaders had also discussed Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Why is US-China meet important?

Next week's Biden-Xi's meeting comes as the US looks forward to its own presidential election next November. Taiwan is also set to hold a presidential election in January.

The Biden administration has now sought to make clear to the Chinese that any actions or interference in the 2024 election “would raise extremely strong concerns from our side,” according to one official.

The officials also noted that Biden is determined to restore military-to-military communications that Beijing largely withdrew from after then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan in August 2022.

All the while, the number of unsafe or provocative encounters involving the two nations' ships and aircraft have spiked.

Last month, the US military released a video of a Chinese fighter jet flying within 10 feet (3 metres) of an American B-52 bomber over the South China Sea, nearly causing an accident. Earlier that month, the Pentagon released footage of some of the more than 180 intercepts of US warplanes by Chinese aircraft that occurred in the last two years, part of a trend US military officials call concerning.

The Pentagon has warned that the lack of military-to-military contacts “raises the risk of an operational incident or miscalculation spiralling into crisis or conflict.”

(With inputs from Associated Press)