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Joe Biden will press Xi Jinping on the need to revive communications between the two powers’ militaries when the US and Chinese presidents hold a summit ahead of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum next week.
The White House said Friday that Biden and Xi would meet in San Francisco Bay on Wednesday before heading to Apec. The two sides are seeking to renew efforts to stabilize ties amid rising tensions over issues including Chinese military activity near Taiwan and U.S. efforts to prevent China from securing advanced U.S. technology.
The summit will be their second in-person meeting as leaders and comes a year after they met at the G20 in Bali, Indonesia. Xi has not been to the US since April 2017, when he met then-President Donald Trump in Florida. The Chinese leader is also expected to attend a dinner with top US executives after his meeting with Biden.
U.S. officials said the leaders would discuss a range of issues, including the prospect of reopening military communications channels that China closed last year after then-Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan.
The US has raised concerns about Chinese fighter jets flying too close to US spy planes and surveillance planes flown over the South China Sea by US allies, including Canada.
“The president is committed to taking the necessary steps to restore what we believe to be central military communications between the U.S. and China,” a U.S. official said.
The official said Biden would raise concerns with Xi about “dangerous” and “provocative” Chinese military activity around Taiwan, which has increased dramatically since the US president took office nearly three years ago.
“The president has consistently made these points, and he will do so again next week in San Francisco,” the official said.
Officials emphasized that the summit, which follows months of high-level engagement, did not mark a change in U.S. policy toward China but a recognition that the powers needed effective channels of communication.
“Fierce competition requires and demands intense diplomacy to manage tensions and prevent competition from devolving into conflict,” the U.S. official said. “Diplomacy is the way we clarify misconceptions, identify them, communicate them, avoid surprises and explain our competitive moves.”
Xie Feng, China’s ambassador to the US, said the two presidents would have “in-depth communications on issues of strategic, overarching and fundamental importance in shaping China-US relations and on major issues of world peace and development”.
US-China relations are in their worst state since the countries normalized diplomatic ties in 1979. Washington is concerned about, among other things, Chinese exports of ingredients for fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that is now the leading killer of young Americans.
Beijing, meanwhile, has been critical of U.S. efforts to curb its military modernization through export controls aimed at slowing progress in developing advanced chips for applications such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing.
When the two leaders met in Bali last November, they agreed on the need to stabilize ties to reduce the chance that increasing competition between the rivals would spiral into military conflict.
But efforts to put a “floor” under the relationship were derailed when a suspected Chinese spy balloon flew over the US in February.