Chinese General Secretary Xi Jinping has been manipulating tensions with the United States in order to fortify his position in Beijing, close observers of the China rivalry assess, culminating in the virtual summit with President Joe Biden this week.
“They just have a victory if they have a summit, and they look like they’re on an equal footing, and the U.S. is [the country] looking to find ways to soothe tensions,” the American Enterprise Institute’s Daniel Blumenthal, author of The China Nightmare, told the Washington Examiner.
That line of analysis places the meeting as the precious development in Xi’s desire for prestige at home and abroad. The communist strongman’s domestic political image centers on his pledge to bring about “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation,” but the coronavirus pandemic and its attendant crises brought a halt to Xi’s foreign travel, even for major recent events such as the G-20 Summit in Rome and the climate conference in Glasgow.
“I think it’s been a big mistake, quite frankly, for China — with respect to China not showing up,” Biden said at the time. “The rest of the world is going to look to China and say, ‘What value added are they providing?’ And they’ve lost an ability to influence people around the world and all the people here at COP — the same way, I would argue, with regard to Russia.”
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That comment touched on a sore subject for Xi, according to some observers. The strongman “hasn’t left [China] in 630 days,” a homebody streak that belies his recent success in orchestrating the adoption of a communique that identified Xi as “the core” of a triumphant Chinese Communist Party.
“He just wants to be seen as being treated as an equal, being seen on the stage as a great power — that is exceptionally important to him, domestically,” said Craig Singleton, a fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ China Program. “He needs to appear on the level with Joe Biden.”
Biden’s team underscored that he regarded the meeting as a format to help avoid any major crisis rather than launch any major diplomatic initiatives or agreements.
“There is no substitute for direct leader-to-leader engagement to prevent miscommunication about our goals and motives, our policies, and, of course, to give direction to our respective governments,” White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said Tuesday morning.
That rhetoric is a truism in most diplomatic settings, but it’s a valuable talking point within the high-stakes Chinese political system, according to Singleton, who views Xi as careful to ensure that no other Chinese Communist figure emerges as a plausible rival.
“This idea of leader-to-leader exchanges … from China’s perspective, that’s how they want it done. That’s not how it was done in the past,” the FDD analyst said. “There were tons of linkages up and down the chain between the U.S. and China. Tons. Now it’s, ‘We need to have leader-to-leader conversations to get anything done.’ And Xi did that on purpose — he purposefully created conditions that his subordinates could not make progress on anything meaningful. It reinforces his position.”
Biden’s team has worked to mitigate Xi’s ability to manipulate the public perceptions of U.S.-China relations, even going so far as to consult with former President Donald Trump’s national security team about China’s diplomatic and propaganda tactics.
“They were very nervous about the way the Chinese were going to portray the dialogue,” AEI’s Zack Cooper said. “The Biden team has been talking to the Trump team, in fact, about some of the games the Chinese play, and I know they’ve been talking to the Obama team.”
That kind of dialogue might be less comfortable for the political heavyweights in China, where Xi has imprisoned his most prominent potential rivals and sacked scores of middle managers of the communist regime.
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“I think he faces a lot of domestic challenges constantly, because he starts these domestic wars, his purges — mass purges,” Blumenthal said. “So I think he sees war at home too — politics, as war and enemies all around.”
