As President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping meet in San Francisco today, the two leaders find themselves in different positions than when they met last year in Bali, Indonesia.
Back then, each was in a position of strength — Biden coming out of a triumphant midterm election and Xi a well-orchestrated party conference that solidified his rule — and both used that first in-person meeting as an occasion to soothe tensions.
Then came the Chinese balloon floating over the United States that tore at the already tenuous condition of US-China relations. The incident bolstered hawks in America gunning for a more assertive US policy toward China (though, under Biden, like Trump, the policy has already been pretty hawkish). Since then, each country’s leader has been tested. Biden has faced troubling poll numbers and gets flack from House Republicans who argue that even meeting with Chinese leaders is a form of capitulation. And now, Israel’s war on Gaza threatens American power globally and possibly Biden’s reelection.
In China, mass protests against Xi’s zero-Covid policies significantly undermined him and forced the country to open up in a somewhat haphazard fashion. His weakness has been exposed as he’s grappled with an economic slowdown and reshuffled ministers.
Now, just sitting down together is considered a success. Wednesday’s meeting on the sides of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit will be the first time in a year the leaders of the world’s two largest economies have talked. This isn’t a big-picture realignment but a tactical cooling, with the hope that presidential diplomacy can yield more diplomatic breakthroughs in the distant future and mitigate the risk of outright conflict in the nearer one.
So, the achievement likely to come out of this year’s Biden-Xi summit is, simply, the meeting itself. If there are policy announcements that emerge from the conversation, experts told me, they are likely to be minor….
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