It’s good news that President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping will hold a virtual summit before the year’s end.
The summit announcement followed a meeting on Wednesday between U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan and Beijing’s foreign policy chief Yang Jiechi. Held in Zurich, Switzerland, that meeting was intended to improve communication between Washington and Beijing and thus mitigate the risk of miscalculations. This is an especially important concern in relation to the increasingly tense contact of U.S. forces and those of the People’s Liberation Army in the South China Sea.
Still, a face-to-face summit between Biden and Xi offers four particular benefits.
First, and most important, a summit will enable Biden to build rapport with Xi. This is not to say that Biden could or should seek Xi’s friendship. But if Biden can foster Xi’s understanding that he’s someone who can be trusted or at the very least credibly engaged with from time to time, it will engender Xi’s willingness to increase that engagement. Diplomatic engagement is preferable to war.
Second, a summit will allow Biden to emphasize directly that while he does not seek conflict, he will not shirk his responsibilities. Biden can state, for example, that any PLA effort to seize the disputed Senkaku islands forcibly from Japan will result in U.S. military action. He can establish that any attack on Australia will be viewed as an attack on America. At the same time, Biden can tell Xi that, in the event of U.S. moves that concern him, he should pick up the phone before authorizing military action or other aggressive actions. This is especially important in the context of the PLA’s rising hawkishness. In turn, lower-ranking officials will find less space to infer Xi’s wishes as they take actions.
Third, Biden can reinforce that he does not share Xi’s perspective on issues such as Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the treatment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang province. Xi insists those are entirely internal affairs. Biden must make plain to Xi that Taiwan is a close U.S. partner, that China is in breach of its international treaty commitments in Hong Kong, and that Beijing’s treatment of the Uyghur people is a genocide. This won’t make Xi happy, of course. But it will help the Chinese Communist Party better anticipate and understand U.S. responses to its actions. It doesn’t need to like those actions, but nor should it believe that the United States is taking action to bring down the Communist Party itself.
Finally, Biden can remind Xi that the good old days, at least for China, of U.S. appeasement are over. He can tell Xi that while he and President Donald Trump had many differences, they share a commitment to defending U.S. interests at home and abroad. And that China will no longer be able to use economic carrots as a means to earn military and political appeasement. This matters because China clearly hopes that it can return U.S.-China relations to the appeasement track pursued by the Bush and Obama administrations. Again, the priority interest here rests in guiding China to adopt a more serious policy framework rather than one that dooms Beijing always to being disappointed.
Ultimately, the U.S. and China are locked in a new Cold War. Nothing will change until one side assumes long-term dominance. But considering the economic and military stakes involved in this struggle, it makes sense that Biden and Xi build a functional personal relationship.
