U.S. officials said on Monday that President Joe Biden will try to convince Chinese dictator Xi Jinping to restore communications between the American and Chinese military commands during their meeting in San Francisco on Wednesday.
Biden is scheduled to meet with Xi on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in San Francisco, their first in-person meeting since the G20 summit in Bali, Indonesia, in November 2022. Xi’s last trip to the United States included a meeting with then-President Donald Trump in April 2017.
Any diplomatic progress made during the Bali meeting was apparently wasted when China flew its spy balloon across the United States in February 2023, about three months after the G20 summit.
Biden eventually ordered the balloon shot down, after it gathered substantial intelligence about U.S. military bases it passed over.
MTG Bursts BIDEN'S BALLOON: "He's Owned by China!" pic.twitter.com/V10Af2wPnP
— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) February 7, 2023
Biden said during a meeting with his donors in June 2023 that the balloon incident was an “embarrassment” for Xi because he was supposedly unaware of the balloon’s activities.
“The reason why Xi Jinping got very upset in terms of when I shot that balloon down with two boxcars full of spy equipment in it is he didn’t know it was there,” Biden told his donors, stunning other administration officials by carelessly revealing sensitive military intelligence during his offhand remarks.
On Tuesday, Voice of America News (VOA) reported the Biden-Xi meeting on Wednesday will take place at the historic Filoli estate south of San Francisco, an attraction that boasts “a Georgian revival-style mansion, English Renaissance gardens, a 2.8-hectare orchard and a 1.6-kilometer trail.”
According to VOA, Chinese officials requested Biden meet with Xi at a venue separate from the APEC meeting so they could hold longer talks.
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The agenda for the roughly four-hour meeting includes “a working lunch, a stroll on the estate, and a smaller meeting with national security advisor Jake Sullivan and Secretary of State Antony Blinken present.”
Biden administration officials said during these talks, Biden will press for restored communication between the U.S. military and the People’s Liberation Army of China (PLA). China suspended such communications after former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) visited Taiwan in August 2022.
“The president has been determined to take the necessary steps to restore what we believe are central communications between the US and China on the military side,” a U.S. official told the Financial Times (FT) on Monday.
The official said Biden will not abandon U.S. complaints about “dangerous” and “provocative” Chinese activity around Taiwan. He insisted the San Francisco meeting does not signal a change in administration policy, but rather a desire to renew communications to avoid “misperceptions” and “surprises.”
Another senior administration official told VOA on Thursday that Biden would “press assertively” during his meeting with Xi because Blinken tried to re-establish military communications during his trip to Beijing in June, but was unsuccessful. Blinken said as much during a press conference after his meetings in Beijing.
“At this moment, China has not agreed to move forward with that. I think that’s an issue that we have to keep working on. It is very important that we restore those channels,” Blinken said in June.
American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Zack Cooper told VOA that China sees little profit in restoring military communications, even if Xi’s anger over Pelosi’s Taiwan visit and the balloon shootdown have faded.
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White House“Beijing continues to believe that crisis management mechanisms generally favor the United States, by allowing Washington to operate near China’s coast with less risk of escalation. So, although I expect some of these dialogues to restart, I would not assume that they will be particularly productive,” Cooper said.
White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said on Sunday that the Biden administration wants precisely those de-escalation and de-confliction hotlines to be restored.
“The president is determined to see the re-establishment of military-to-military ties because he believes it’s in the U.S. national security interest. We need those lines of communication so that there aren’t mistakes or miscalculations or miscommunication,” Sullivan said.
“The Chinese have basically severed those communication links. President Biden would like to re-establish that. This is a top agenda item,” Sullivan stressed.
German Marshall Fund Indo-Pacific Program managing director Bonnie Glaser told VOA that Xi would probably also ignore Biden’s pleas to avoid meddling in Taiwan’s January presidential election. Beijing strongly favors pro-China candidate Hou Yu-ih of the Kuomintang Party, but current Vice President William Lai of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) has a strong lead.
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