Xi-Biden meeting seen as putting rocky relations back on course, though main differences remain
TAIPEI, Taiwan — Perhaps just shaking hands and sitting down together can be enough sometimes.
At their four-hour meeting Wednesday, U.S. President Joe Biden and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping didn’t resolve any of the vital geopolitical issues dividing the world’s two largest economies and chief rivals for global influence, but they struck a conciliatory tone that came as a relief to other countries, especially China’s neighbors.
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The two leaders met at a northern California country estate, holding talks, lunching and taking a garden stroll designed to show that while the two countries are global competitors, they’re not locked in a winner-take-all faceoff.
“Planet Earth is big enough for the two countries to succeed,” Xi told Biden.
Biden emphasized the need to avoid miscommunication. “We have to ensure competition does not veer into conflict,” he said.
The leaders’ first face-to-face encounter in a year appears to have put a floor under a relationship that at times has seemed to be in freefall over various issues, from trade and technology to U.S. support for Taiwan, China’s human rights record and even the source of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Taiwan’s Foreign Ministry appeared to welcome the warming of relations, noting the U.S. had again laid down the bottom line that China must use peaceful means in dealing with the self-governed island that Beijing claims as its own territory, to be taken by force if it deems it necessary.
“We express our affirmation and welcome for President Biden again making use of the venue of a meeting with the leader of China to again openly press the strict U.S. position insisting on peace in the Taiwan Strait,” spokesperson Jeff Liu said.
South Koreans watched the meeting with a mixture of hope and skepticism. Living with a growing nuclear threat from rival North Korea, the South primarily focuses on ensuring its security through its crucial military and diplomatic ally, the U.S. Seoul has chafed at Beijing’s unwillingness to back stronger sanctions and pressure on Pyongyang over its nuclear and missile programs at the U.N. Security Council.
But South Korea’s largest trading partner is China, and the Biden’s administration’s steps to restrict sales of advanced chip technologies to China set off furious lobbying to minimize the impact on South Korean semiconductor makers like Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix.
In an editorial on Thursday, South Korea’s Kookmin Ilbo newspaper said a meaningful improvement in U.S.-China relations would have major consequences to global supply chains and the “composition of the new Cold War between North Korea-China-Russia and South Korea-U.S.-Japan.”
During this year’s summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, being held in San Francisco, Japanese officials have focused more on trying to arrange a meeting between Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and Xi to help persuade Beijing to lift a ban on imports of Japanese seafood due to the release of treated wastewater from the wrecked Fukushima nuclear power plant.
