In China, the meeting of the most senior Chinese foreign politician, Yang Jiechi, with the US President's national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, met with a strikingly positive response.
"The meeting was described as constructive and conducive to improving mutual understanding," the state-run Xinhua news agency reported on Thursday.
Yang and Sullivan paved the way for a video summit for the presidents of both countries, Joe Biden and Xi Jinping, in a six-hour conversation in Zurich on Wednesday.
Friederike Böge
Political correspondent for China, North Korea and Mongolia.
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According to American information, an agreement was reached “in principle” that the virtual meeting should take place before the end of the year.
The South China Morning Post reported, citing a Chinese source, that the American side had proposed a face-to-face meeting.
However, Xi Jinping has not left China since the pandemic began.
After the latest phone call between the two heads of state in September, there had been reports that Xi had not responded to Biden's proposal for a meeting.
"Managing responsibly" competition with China
Biden's spokeswoman said on Wednesday that top-level dialogue is "an important part of our effort to responsibly manage competition with China, especially given the concentration of power in the Chinese leadership." On the American side, it was recently criticized that Chinese interlocutors merely reproduced known points because they were not authorized to go beyond them. This assessment was given in connection with the poorly profitable China trips of the US Secretary of State Wendy Sherman and the special climate envoy John Kerry in July and September.
Yang Jiechi was unusually friendly after meeting Sullivan.
He praised Biden's “positive statements” during his UN General Assembly in September.
China considers it important that the United States, in Biden's words, “does not seek a new Cold War”.