President Joe Biden will speak with Chinese President Xi Jinping Thursday morning in a phone conversation the White House declined to confirm for days.
“This is the fifth call between the two leaders since President Biden took office,” a White House official said. “Readout to come after the call.”
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Biden told reporters last week he planned to speak with Xi “within the next 10 days,” but as recently as Wednesday, both White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and National Security Council strategic communications coordinator John Kirby declined to announce a date or time.
“There is an awful lot in the bilateral relationship between the United States and China for these two leaders to talk about,” Kirby said during his joint briefing with Jean-Pierre. “And that’s the key thing — is that the president wants to make sure that the lines of communication with President Xi remain open because they need to.”
“Clearly, tensions over Taiwan, China’s aggressive and coercive behavior in the Indo-Pacific, outside of Taiwan, tensions in the economic relationship, Russia’s unprovoked war in Ukraine — I would expect all these things to be part and parcel of the conversation,” he added.
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The Biden-Jinping discussion is scheduled to take place at 8:30 a.m., the same time as the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis is anticipated to publish its quarterly GDP numbers. The White House has spent the past two weeks pushing back on economists and reporters who suggest a lack of economic growth for a second quarter will be indicative of a recession.
