With all eyes on Gaza, a series of meetings in Washington between senior U.S. and Chinese officials late last week was slightly overlooked by the news cycle. Those sessions, however, have the potential to bring President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping into the same room as soon as mid-November, when the U.S. is due to host an economic conference in San Francisco.
The last time Biden and Xi met for in-person talks was during the November 2022 G20 leaders’ summit in Bali, Indonesia. Those discussions were a seminal event, not because of anything the two agreed to but rather because the meeting happened at all. The previous month, the U.S. slapped strict export controls on advanced technology to China, which Chinese officials up and down the Communist Party bureaucracy strongly condemned as a transparent attempt to stifle the Chinese economy and undermine Beijing’s rise as a great power. Several months before that, in August 2022, U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi, then the speaker of the House, decided to fly to Taiwan despite the Biden administration’s objections, prompting the Chinese People’s Liberation Army to retaliate with the largest military drills around the self-ruled island in history.
Biden and Xi’s meeting a year ago was meant to reset the U.S.-China relationship in the hope of moving past the acrimony. As the White House said at the time, Biden “reiterated that this competition should not veer into conflict and underscored that the United States and China must manage the competition responsibly and maintain open lines of communication.”
Intentions, of course, mean nothing if they’re not implemented. The cautious goodwill established at the Bali summit evaporated almost instantly as 2022 transitioned into 2023. The infamous Chinese spy balloon episode, in which a blimplike structure with high-tech cameras slowly meandered across the continental United States, dominated headlines for what seemed like an eternity. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who had a trip to Beijing in the works, postponed it in protest of the intrusion. A U.S. fighter jet eventually shot the balloon down off the Carolina coast, but the entire incident took the form of a giant skunk at the garden party. The balloon cast a shadow over the most important bilateral relationship on the planet, with politicians on both sides embarking on overheated rhetoric and policymakers reluctant to step forward lest they be castigated by the hard-liners as wimps afraid of a fight.
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