This year’s Biden-Xi summit has better foundation, but risks won’t go away

The course of events in the year since the last meeting between Presidents Joe Biden and Xi Jinping offers cautious hope that they will have better luck this time around. But it also shows how easily any agreement they reach could once again veer off course.

The U.S. and Chinese leaders meet today [Macau time] while attending the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in San Francisco.

They go into the meeting on the back of five months of government-to-government talks that have accelerated in recent weeks and expanded to cultural and business exchanges. In contrast, the November 2022 meeting in Bali, Indonesia, took place after China had suspended talks to express anger over a visit by then-U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan.

“This rests on a stronger foundation than the Bali meeting did,” said Jude Blanchette, a China expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Substantively and contextually this meeting is taking place in a moderately better environment.”

But tensions over Taiwan and flare-ups between China and the Philippines in the South China Sea are a sobering reminder that an unexpected incident could set back efforts to improve ties, just as an apparently errant Chinese balloon did early this year.

Talk also only goes so far with the two governments fundamentally at odds over technology, defense, trade and Taiwan. Last month, the Biden administration expanded restrictions on technology exports to China.

Recent experience has shown that more frequent communication “does not exclude the continued expansion and escalation of America’s preparations for war and high-tech deterrence against China, nor does it exclude China’s corresponding countermeasures, protests and preparations,” said Shi Yinhong, an international relations professor at Renmin University of China.

Rather than achieving major breakthroughs, the hope is that the leaders will set the tone for meaningful dialogue on a range of issues in the coming months, Blanchette said. “The more probable reality is it’s going to be a little bit of that but we have a lot of speed bumps that can trip up the two at any point.”

KEN MORITSUGU, BEIJING, MDT/AP