What to Expect From the Xi-Biden Meeting

For the first time in a year, Chinese President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Joe Biden will meet face-to-face this Wednesday. The meeting, held in the San Francisco Bay Area during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, is expected to yield progress on a few key areas of mutual interest between the U.S. and China. While the deliverables are likely to be modest, the meeting’s most important function may be preventing the relationship from deteriorating further than it already has­ into ever riskier territory.

The two leaders’ last meeting, on the sidelines of the G-20 in Bali last November, led to a brief rapprochement, with both sides pledging to work more closely together. However, that pledge was quickly tested. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s scheduled follow-up trip to Beijing in February was thwarted after a Chinese spy balloon drifted over the U.S. In the subsequent months, the countries’ presidents have traded harsh language; Xi said the U.S. aimed to contain and suppress China, while Biden called Xi a “dictator.”

A key source of China’s displeasure toward the U.S. has been a series of measures the Biden administration has unleashed to block the export of advanced chip technologies to prevent their military use in China. In response, China has retaliated with its own trade restrictions on critical minerals. Meanwhile, on the military front, the U.S. has reported a rising number of “risky intercepts,” where Chinese aircraft and vessels have passed dangerously close to U.S. forces in the air and sea.

The meeting this week is a sign that both countries want to turn things around. The U.S. has been leading that push since the summer; Blinken and several other members of Biden’s cabinet have traveled to China to restart engagement. In return, Foreign Minister Wang Yi and other senior Chinese officials have visited the U.S. in recent months. Xi himself signaled a change in tone when he told Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer that there were “1,000 reasons to make China-U.S. relations work well” during Schumer’s visit to Beijing in October.

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Leading into this week’s meeting, both countries have set expectations relatively low. “I think really, at this point, U.S.-China summitry is no longer about the major list of deliverables, the building of the relationship; I think it’s more now about managing a relationship that’s in a secular decline,” Rick Waters, managing director of the China practice at Eurasia Group and former head of the State Department’s China House, said at a Foreign Policy-Quincy Institute event last Thursday.

Nonetheless, some concrete outcomes are expected from the summit. Axios reported that the U.S. and China will announce a resumption of military-to-military dialogue that China canceled after then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in August 2022—an ask the U.S. has been making for a long time. The two countries are also expected to ban the use of AI in certain military settings, including nuclear weapons programs, the South China Morning Post reported.

Both leaders will also push their own agendas. On the Chinese side, this year’s economic slowdown looms large. “The argument is that China wants this meeting to reopen, for example, economic cooperation with the United States—it wants U.S. investment again,” said Yun Sun, director of the China program at the Stimson Center. In the last quarter, China’s foreign direct investment flows were negative for the first time in 25 years, and Xi is slated to appeal directly to the U.S. business community. He is expected to attend a dinner hosted by the U.S.-China Business Council and the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations; seats at the dinner were sold for $2,000 a head. China is also likely to push the U.S. to drop Trump-era tariffs and roll back technology export controls, but neither wish is likely to be granted, experts said.

Along with the economy, “managing Taiwan is likely to be top of the agenda for China, and China may also seek additional reassurances from the United States,” said Bonny Lin, a senior fellow for Asian security at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, at a press briefing last week. The U.S. will likely reiterate its “One China” policy, but experts said additional reassurances, such as directly opposing Taiwan’s formal independence, are unlikely to come.

On the U.S. side, one of the main goals of the Biden administration heading into the meeting is to solidify the conditions to compete responsibly with China. Restoring military-to-military communication will be a step forward from the U.S. perspective, and the U.S. hopes to continue the series of high-level meetings restarted over the summer. Another top priority is curbing China’s export of fentanyl precursors to Mexico. Some progress on climate cooperation may also be announced coming out of a meeting between the two countries’ special climate envoys last week in southern California.

The scale of these announcements will be an important metric for how much the two countries can jointly accomplish while locked in an era of competition. Rep. Mike Gallagher, chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, and other Republicans criticized Biden for pursuing “zombie-like engagement” with China in a letter ahead of the summit, writing that the Biden policy has led to “very real tradeoffs” with “negligible benefit.” But Yun and other experts said it is critical for the presidents to meet at such a fraught time for the two countries, even if it results in few concrete concessions from China or new announcements.

“Regardless of how competitive this relationship is, I think both countries want to avoid a war; they want to avoid a conflict,” Yun said. “Nobody can overstate the importance of that agenda.”