Biden and Xi Return to the Table with High Stakes –

and Low Expectations

Nectar Gan
CNN
November 14, 2022

When Joe Biden and Xi Jinping first got to know each other more

than 10 years ago, the US and China had been moving closer for
three decades despite their differences.

“The trajectory of the relationship is nothing but positive, and it’s

overwhelmingly in the mutual interest of both our countries,”
Biden said in 2011 when, as vice president, he visited Beijing to
build a personal relationship with China’s then leader-in-waiting.

Seated next to Xi in a Beijing hotel, Biden told a room of Chinese

and American business leaders about his “great optimism about
the next 30 years” for bilateral relations and praised Xi for being
“straightforward.”

“Only friends and equals can serve each other by being

straightforward and honest with them,” he said.

On Monday, the two leaders are set to meet each other  for

another honest exchange in Bali, Indonesia, on the sidelines of
the Group of 20 summit. But the mood in the room is unlikely to
be as balmy as the surrounding location.

The positivity and optimism of a decade ago has been replaced by

mutual suspicion and hostility. When Biden returned to the
White House as President, he was handed a US-China
relationship in its worst shape in decades, with tensions flaring
across trade, technology, geopolitics and ideology.

The upcoming meeting – the first in-person encounter between

Biden and Xi since the US President took office – comes at a
crucial time for both leaders. Having further consolidated his
power at last month’s Communist Party Congress, Xi is heading

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into the meeting as the strongest Chinese leader since Mao
Zedong.

Biden, meanwhile, arrived in Asia following a better-than-

expected performance by his party in the US midterm elections  –
with the Democrats projected to keep the Senate in a major
victory. Asked Sunday whether the results allowed him to go into
Monday’s face-to-face with a stronger hand, Biden voiced
confidence. “I know I’m coming in stronger,” he told reporters.

The stakes of their much-anticipated meeting are high. In a world

reeling from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine , the Covid-19
pandemic and the devastation of climate change, the two major
powers need to work together more than ever to instill stability –
instead of driving deeper tensions along geopolitical fault lines.

But expectations for the meeting are low. Locked in an

intensifying great power rivalry, the US and China disagree with
each other on just about every major issue, from Taiwan, the war
in Ukraine, North Korea, the transfer of technology  to the shape
of the world order .

Perhaps the only real common ground the two sides share going
into the meeting is their limited hopes for what might come out
of it.

A senior White House official said Thursday Biden wants to use

the talks to “build a floor” for the relationship – in other words,
to prevent it from free falling into open conflict. The main
objective of the sit-down is not about reaching agreements or
deliverables – the two leaders will not release any joint statement
afterward – but about gaining a better understanding of each
other’s priorities and reducing misconceptions, according to the
US official.

US national security adviser Jake Sullivan reinforced the message

Saturday to reporters aboard Air Force One, noting the meeting is
unlikely to result in any major breakthroughs or dramatic shifts
in the relationship.

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Hopes for a reset with Washington are similarly low in Beijing.
Shi Yinhong, an international relations professor at Renmin
University, said it would be an “enormous over-expectation” to
believe the meeting can lead to any lasting and significant
improvement in bilateral ties.

“Given that China and the US are in a state of near-total rivalry

and confrontation, there is not much possibility to anticipate that
the major issues can be truly clarified,” Shi said.

At the center of their divergence is how the two nations view each
other’s motives – and how detrimental these goals are to their
own interests.

“The Chinese believe the US goal is to keep China down so we can

contain it. And the US believes China’s goal is to make the world
safer for authoritarian states, push the US out of Asia and weaken
its alliance system,” said Scott Kennedy, senior adviser in Chinese
business and economics at the Center for Strategic and
International Studies (CSIS) in Washington.

Each side blames the other entirely for the state of the
relationship and each believes they are faring better than the
other in the situation, said Kennedy, who has recently returned
from a weeks-long visit to China – a rare opportunity in recent
years due to China’s zero-Covid border restrictions.

“The Chinese think they’re winning, the Americans think they’re

winning, and so they’re willing to bear these costs. And they think
the other side is very unlikely to make any significant changes,”
Kennedy said. “All of those things reduce the likelihood of
significant adjustments.”

But experts say the very fact that the two leaders are having a
face-to-face conversation is itself a positive development.
Keeping dialogue open is crucial for reducing risks of
misunderstanding and miscalculations, especially when
suspicions run deep and tensions run high.

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Direct communication is all the more important given Xi has
just secured a norm-shattering third term  with a tighter grip on
power than ever – and a possibility to rule for life. “There is no
one else in their system who can really communicate
authoritatively other than Xi Jinping,” national security adviser
Sullivan said.

‘Red lines’

On Wednesday, Biden told a news conference  that he wants to

“lay out what each of our red lines are” when he sits down with
Xi, but experts say that might not be as straightforward as it
sounds.

“I would love to be a fly on the wall to see that conversation

because I don’t think that the US or China has been very precise
about what its red lines are. And I also don’t think either has
been very clear about what positive rewards the other side would
reap from staying within those red lines,” said Kennedy, of CSIS.

For Beijing, no red line is starker or more crucial than its claim
over Taiwan – a self-governing democracy the Chinese
Communist Party has never controlled. Xi views “reunification”
with the island as a key unresolved issue on China’s path toward
“great rejuvenation,” a sweeping vision he has vowed to achieve
by 2049.

And perhaps no American President has angered Beijing over

Taiwan in recent decades more than Biden, who has said –
on four separate occasions  – the US will defend the island in the
event of a Chinese invasion. Each time, his aids have rushed to
walk back his remarks and denied any changes in the US’ “One
China” policy.

Under the “One China” policy, Washington acknowledges

Beijing’s position that Taiwan is part of China, but has never
accepted its claim of sovereignty over the island. The US provides
Taiwan defensive weapons, but has remained deliberately vague

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on whether it would intervene militarily if China attacks the
island – a policy known as “strategic ambiguity.”

China has repeatedly accused the US of “playing with fire” and

hollowing out the “one China” policy. Beijing’s anger reached a
boiling point in August, when US House Speaker Nancy
Pelosi brushed aside its stern warnings  and landed in Taipei for a
high-profile visit.

China responded by launching large scale military

exercises around Taiwan that formed an effective blockade; it
also halted dialogue with the US  in a number of areas, from
military, climate change and cross-border crime to drug
trafficking.

Now the two leaders are sitting down in the same room – a result
of weeks of intensive discussions between the two sides – Taiwan
is widely expected to top their agenda. But in a sign of the
contentiousness of the issue, barbs have already been traded.

Biden has said he would make no “fundamental concessions” to

Xi, and Sullivan has announced plans to brief Taiwan about the
talks with an aim to make Taipei feel “secure and comfortable”
about US support.

That plan drew immediate condemnation from Beijing. “It is

egregious in nature. China is firmly opposed to it,” Chinese
foreign ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said Friday, shortly
after the ministry confirmed that Xi would meet Biden at the
G20.

“The problem with China is they don’t like to meet and exchange
views – they just repeat talking points. Xi Jinping is not very
creative in the way he interacts with his counterparts,” said Jean-
Pierre Cabestan, a professor of political science at Hong Kong
Baptist University.

Other key topics on the agenda include Russia’s war in Ukraine –

another significant point of tension, as well as areas where the US

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hopes to cooperate with China – such as North Korea’s ongoing
provocations and climate change.

Shi, the Chinese expert at Renmin University, sees little room for
breakthroughs on these issues.

“On the issue of Ukraine, China has already made its position
clear many times. It will not change simply because of the talks
with the US President. On North Korea, since March last year,
China has already stopped treating the denuclearization of North
Korea as a fundamental element of its Korean Peninsular policy,”
he said.

Nor is his assessment for climate cooperation any rosier. “China

and the US can find many common interests on this, but when it
comes to how to deal with climate change specifically, it always
leads to antagonism on policies and rivalry over ideology and
global influence,” Shi said.

Experts in the US and China say some progress on greater

communication and access between the two countries will already
be considered a positive outcome – such as restoring suspended
climate and military talks.

“Hopefully the meeting can be used for more than just airing
mutual grievances,” said Patricia Kim, a China expert at the
Brookings Institution. “For instance, a joint declaration by Biden
and Xi that they oppose the threat or use of nuclear weapons in
Ukraine and on the Korean Peninsula, as well as a nod to
restarting working-level exchanges on areas of common interest
such as climate change and counter-narcotics would be
promising.”

Personal relationship

Over the decade of their relationship, Biden and Xi have spent

dozens of hours together across the US and China.

During Biden’s getting-to-know-you trip to China in 2011, the two

leaders shared a marathon of meetings and meals in Beijing and

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the southwestern city of Chengdu. They also took a trip deep into
the green mountains of Sichuan province to visit a rural high
school rebuilt after a deadly earthquake.

The next year, Xi paid a reciprocal visit to the US at the invitation

of Biden, who hosted his Chinese counterpart for dinner at his
residency after a series of meetings at the White House, State
Department and the Pentagon. Biden also flew to Los Angeles to
meet Xi on the last leg of his trip.

Their in-person encounters continued after Xi took power in

2012. The last time they met face to face was in 2015, during Xi’s
first state visit to the US as China’s top leader.

As relations between their countries plummeted, the once

friendly dynamics between the two leaders have also shifted.

Xi is an ideological hardliner who believes in China’s return to

the center of the world stage and is skeptical – some would say
hostile – toward America. Biden, meanwhile, has grown
increasingly weary of China’s authoritarian turn under Xi , and
has framed the rivalry between the two countries as a battle
between autocracy and democracy.

Last summer, Biden publicly pushed back on being described as

an “old friend” of Xi’s.

“Let’s get something straight. We know each other well; we’re not
old friends. It’s just pure business,” he said at the time.

Given the growing divide, the two-year gap since their last in-
person meeting is an extremely long time, Kennedy pointed out.

“One conversation on the sidelines of a multilateral summit is

still insufficient to fully discuss all the key issues that the
countries face. And so hopefully, the two sides will facilitate a
greater discussion on these issues by many parts of the two
governments.”