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.