Was at Mar-a-Lago by Donald Trump, in 2017, Xi Jinping’s last time in the USA, three months after the tycoon’s arrival at the White House. The same Chinese leader that Barack Obama welcomed in 2013 at the Sunnylands estate. Now Xi returns to the USA, to San Francisco. It was here that the Chinese leader visited the United States for the first time, in 1985, when he was 31 years old, in what the official Chinese news agency Xinhua writes is believed to be the first foreign trip of the “young and promising” Xi official, Party secretary in Zhengding County, Hebei Province. A visit, with a stop in Iowa, which “perhaps was also his first and only experience of staying with an American family”.
Now the United States is preparing to welcome Xi again, but Xi ‘the emperor’, in a climate and context very different from Mar-a-Lago. That ’emperor’ whom Biden did not hesitate to define as a “dictator” and who, according to various American media, would haveA private dinner with American entrepreneurs is also planned, after the bilateral meeting with the American president. It seems that, wrote the New York Timesfor 40,000 dollars you can have eight reserved seats plus one at the ’emperor’s’ table. Tickets would start at $2,000 each.
The Chinese leader arrives for the Apec summit in San Francisco, itself a more formal occasion – with dozens of leaders – than the Mar-a-Lago or Sunnylands talks. On the sidelines of the proceedings he will meet Joe Biden, whom he has known for more than ten years and whom he saw a year ago on the sidelines of the G20 in Bali. Since that day, the Washington Post highlighted, Biden and Xi have not had direct contact and this will be the seventh interaction between the two presidents since January 2021, since Biden has been in the White House, but only the second in-person meeting. In October, the head of Chinese diplomacy, Wang Yi, had already made it clear – from Washington – that “the road to San Francisco” would not be “easy”.
A lot happened between Xi’s two visits: from the trade war, to the coronavirus pandemic, from the conflict in Ukraine to the one in the Middle East. The military ambitions of the Asian giant and the ‘treatment’ reserved by the Dragon for foreign companies are worrying. Relations, CNN highlights, have gradually worsened as never before in recent decades. What began as a trade war in the Trump era soon spread to other areas, from technology to national security, through geopolitics and visions of global order, a competition that – underlines Nectar Gan for the American network – is has intensified with the Biden Administration.
In between, there is Nancy Pelosi’s August 2022 visit to Taiwan who, as speaker of the US House, aroused the ire of Beijing, with the People’s Republic launching major military maneuvers and communication channels with Washington broken down. Because for the Dragon, Taiwan, a de facto independent island, is just a “rebel province” to be “reunified”. Then, last February, the crisis linked to the suspected spy ball.
Since then the US has ‘invested’ months in trying to ease tensions: Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, climate envoy John Kerry, CIA chief William Burns and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo were in China (National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan recently met Wang in Washington).
However, the era of that “personal diplomacy” between leaders seems to be over – that of the meetings at Mar-a-Lago and in the Sunnylands estate – considered crucial for defining and consolidating bilateral relations. “I think we have now overcome that phase. I can hardly imagine Biden inviting Xi to his private residence – commented Yun Sun, head of the China program of the Stimson Center think tank in Washington, quoted by CNN – San Francisco will be a very formal occasion”.
Also because a few years after Xi came to power, he rebuilt CNN, American officials soon began to realize that they could not trust the promises made by the Chinese leader during “personal diplomacy” (in 2015, during a state visit to the USA, he promised that the Asian giant would not “seek the militarization” of the South China Sea). And if for Sun “those four years of the Obama Administration caused enormous damage to American trust regarding the behavior of Xi’s China”, a few months after the reception at Mar-a-Lago, in July 2017 Trump was already accusing the Chinese – via the then Twitter – to “do nothing for us with North Korea”. And shortly thereafter the trade war began.
“Now – says the expert – we are at the point where the two sides have had a strong damage to mutual trust and both are discovering that national interests essentially do not align”. The expected face-to-face between Xi and Biden, summarized the Post, comes as the US and China “try to stabilize relations shaken by a series of crises” and as conflicts in Europe and the Middle East “threaten to divert the attention of Washington from what the Biden Administration has often indicated as the most important geopolitical challenge: managing the competition with China.”
The hope of the United States, said White House sources quoted by Fox News, is that the meeting between Biden and Xi will serve to ease bilateral tensions at a time when “intense diplomacy” is needed. The American president will underline the importance of keeping “the lines of communication open”, an Administration official further explained. The goal is always to “manage the competition responsibly”. The two presidents, according to officials cited by the Post, will talk about collaboration in areas of mutual concern (such as climate change) and are also expected to address points of disagreement, from the conflict in Ukraine to human rights, via disputes in the South China Sea and Taiwan , where presidential elections are scheduled for January.
Biden, the sources say, will also put pressure on Xi to contribute on the ‘Iran front’ to avoid a widening of the conflict between Israel and Hamas. Beijing’s Foreign Ministry says the two presidents will talk about “strategic, general and direction” issues regarding relations between the United States and China, as well as addressing issues related to “global peace and development”. And they reiterate that the People’s Republic “will consider and manage its relations with the US in line with the three principles of mutual respect, peaceful coexistence and mutually beneficial cooperation”.
Xi, writes Xinhua, “returns to the US in search of the path to follow for the tense ties between the two main economies of the world”. And, concludes the BBC, “neither side expects any turning point that could constitute a reset for relations, it will be a matter of managing and stabilizing relations”.
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