With Biden's return to negotiating with Xi

US attitudes are getting darker towards the Chinese leader

Biden has met the Chinese leader several times before.

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During one of his meetings in 2011 with then Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping, Joe Biden, who was in the same position in the United States, welcomed the direction in which relations between Washington and Beijing were taking, but since then the situation has changed.

Biden told businessmen who came to meet the US and Chinese vice presidents in a Beijing hotel at the time, that "the trajectory of the relationship is positive," expressing his "great optimism about the next 30 years."

But now, a little more than a decade after that meeting, Xi and Biden, who became president, are preparing to meet again, in an unfavorable relationship, and no US political official is optimistic about Xi, China's most powerful leader in decades, who has secured a historic third term. just yet.

Biden and Xi will hold talks tomorrow, Monday, on the sidelines of the Group of Twenty summit in Bali, at a time when American anxiety is mounting. China has become under Xi, in the words of Foreign Minister Anthony Blinken, “more repressive at home” and “more aggressive abroad,” with The impossibility of China threatening to invade Taiwan is more serious.

This will be the first in-person meeting between the US and Chinese presidents since talks with former President Donald Trump in 2019 with Xi, who finally resumed foreign trips after the epidemic.

But Biden and Xi know each other, and have spoken by phone or video five times since the Democratic president entered the White House in 2021, their relationship is much deeper.

When Xi was vice president, Biden traveled to China in 2011 and later invited his counterpart to tour the United States.

Biden said that as vice president, he spent 67 hours with Xi as part of the then-Barack Obama administration's effort to understand or woo the rising Chinese leader.

Since then, US officials and experts estimate that Xi, 69, does not wish to be more moderate, given the new Communist Party of China Central Committee is made up of hardliners.

Both Biden and Trump viewed China as the United States' biggest international rival, and while Trump attacked China on everything from trade to "Covid-19", Biden backed talks on narrow areas of cooperation.

Biden told reporters on Wednesday that he would talk to Xi about each country's "red lines" in hopes of avoiding conflict.

Among China's red lines is democratic and autonomous Taiwan, of which Beijing says it is a part, where Beijing conducted exercises that were considered a test-attack, in protest of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit in August.

Biden said on three occasions that the United States would defend Taiwan militarily if China attacked it, while the White House appeared to be retreating from its long-standing strategy of "strategic ambiguity."

"There is a widespread feeling that the United States has finally understood the nature of the threat," said a senior Washington-based diplomat from an Asian ally of the United States.

But Biden said he hoped to cooperate with China, the biggest emitter of carbon dioxide, on the issue of climate change, while officials said Saturday that Biden would press Xi on North Korea, a Chinese ally that has launched a barrage of missiles in recent weeks.

 Both Biden and Trump considered China the United States' greatest international rival.

While Trump has attacked China on everything from trade to COVID-19, Biden has backed talks on narrow areas of cooperation.

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