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US-China summit: Biden to tell Xi to ‘play by the rules of the road’
US President Joe Biden plans to tell Chinese President Xi Jinping in their first face-to-face virtual meeting that he must “play by the rules of the road” as responsible nations do on everything from technology to trade to international institutions and international waterways.
US President Joe Biden plans to tell Chinese President Xi Jinping in their first face-to-face virtual meeting on Monday that he must “play by the rules of the road” as responsible nations do on everything from technology to trade to international institutions and international waterways.
The American leader will also make clear to his Chinese counterpart that he intends to “build commonsense guardrails” to avoid miscalculation or misunderstanding about the relationship between the two countries, a senior Biden administration said previewing the meeting on condition of anonymity.
The two nations, the official said starkly describing the current state of relationship, are in a “fundamentally different place with each other than we have been in the past”.
The Monday evening meeting will be the first face-to-face meeting - virtually - between the two leaders who have had extensive telephone conversations on two occasions before, the most recent of which was on September 9.
The official sought to tamp down expectations from the meeting, which is expected to last some hours, saying, “this meeting is about our ongoing efforts to responsibly manage the competition not about agreeing to a specific deliverable or outcome” and setting the terms of the competition will be an ongoing effort and this meeting between the two leaders is one step in that.
President Biden has sought to define the relationship with China as one of intense competition between the world’s two largest economies in which the United States will seek to force China to play by the rules, working with allies and partners, and keep thorny issues of human rights in Xinjiang, democracy in Hong Kong and Taiwan on the table.
The delusional goal of changing China through engagement as pursued by past administrations - not so much by the previous dispensation led by President Donald Trump - has no purchase from Biden. “Unlike previous approaches to your policy with respect to China, the Biden administration is not trying to change China through bilateral engagement. We don’t think that’s realistic,” the official said.
The US is going into the meeting with a three-point agenda. One, Biden will emphasise the need for “commonsense guardrails” and keeping communication lines open. Two, the US president will raise areas of concern about “threats we see to the rules based international order, unfair economic behaviour, such as China’s extraordinary supportive of industry and its practice of economic coercion, its human rights practices” and its “provocative behaviour” with respect to Taiwan. Three, the two leaders will also seek to further cooperation in areas of mutual agreement such as climate change and health.
