In his first conversation in seven months, President Biden spoke by telephone with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Thursday night from the treaty room of the White House residence. The 90-minute call was initiated by Mr Biden and motivated by what is essentially his exasperation because lower-level Chinese officials have not been willing to hold substantive talks during meetings with members of his administration.
A senior government official told reporters that one of the challenges of U.S.-China interactions so far is that the sense that they “played for the press” and used interactions with government officials of Biden as attempts to drive propaganda rather than substance. The tone of Thursday night’s call was described as “respectful” as well as frank and familiar.
The president reiterated that he wants to keep communication channels open so that the two countries do not “involuntarily divert the conflict.” The intention of the call was to hold a strategic conversation on how to manage competition between the two world powers. The official also said the phone call was a test: to see if the conversations at the highest level would be more effective, given Xi’s consolidation of power.
Biden has repeatedly mentioned his personal familiarity with Xi. He told Norah O’Donnell of CBS News in February, “I had 24-25 hours of private meetings with [Xi] when he was vice president, I traveled 17,000 miles with him. I know him pretty well. “
But the two presidents have not yet held a face-to-face meeting and US-China relations have been strained for years. It’s been seven months since Biden took office and he has yet to achieve a China trade policy and many of the tariffs set by the Trump administration remain in place.
“The economic dimension of our policy remains under review and hopefully will close in the not too distant future,” senior management said.
When asked about business issues, the senior administration official simply replied that Xi did not ask any “questions” about the issue during Thursday’s call.
Biden administration officials have had a series of awkward meetings with their Chinese counterparts since their first face-to-face meeting in March in Anchorage, Alaska. During this session, Chinese diplomats exchanged angry words on camera in front of the press as they met with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan.
Undersecretary of State Wendy Sherman’s visit to Tianjing in July was also tense.
“I don’t want to convey that diplomacy on specific issues has hit a wall,” a senior official said in response to a question about the state of affairs. The official described these previous interactions as “unfruitful”.
U.S. climate envoy John Kerry was in China last week to see if the two countries – the world’s main polluters – could negotiate an agreement on shared climate concern. A day earlier, China’s foreign minister had rhetorically related Beijing’s potential willingness to cooperate on climate change to the overall relationship between the United States and China.
The Biden administration believes that many of these traps are only for China’s domestic propaganda. The senior administration official stated that Chinese officials simply read the conversation points in order to act for their bosses during their interactions and that they do not have the real ability to negotiate.
“They are trying to see if we will blink,” the senior administration official said.