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A highly anticipated meeting between China’s leader Xi Jinping and President Biden finished Monday with both leaders expressing an openness to restoring channels of communication and repairing a relationship that has been compared to a second Cold War.
The leaders of two superpowers met face-to-face and unmasked on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit in Bali, Indonesia, on Monday evening. In a substantial meeting, they touched on the war in Ukraine, military tension in the Taiwan Strait and North Korean missile tests.
Biden said he and Xi were “very blunt with one another.” Xi, according to his spokesperson, viewed the meeting as “in-depth, candid and constructive.”
Here’s what you need to know about their three-hour discussion.A “baby step” — but a step in the right direction
Biden and Xi both said in their opening remarks that they were looking for ways to coexist despite their disagreements. The two spent lots of time together when they were both vice presidents more than a decade ago — and both men referenced their lengthy relationship in warm greetings before the talks began.
“Do I believe he’s willing to compromise on certain issues? Yes,” Biden told reporters afterward about his meeting with Xi. “We were very blunt with one another about places where we disagreed.”
Today’s meeting was the first face-to-face exchange between the two since Biden became president. It took place after both leaders had just strengthened their respective political positions at home, analysts say.
Yu Jie, a senior research fellow on China at the London-based think tank Chatham House, says that given Biden’s “reasonable success” in the midterms, he is in a stronger position to steer Washington’s relationship with Beijing.
And for Xi, Yu says his further consolidation of power in the Chinese system may leave him more space for conducting diplomacy. “Xi is keen to resume a routinized mechanism and dialogue to steady the bilateral ties with Biden,” she says.
U.S. officials share this relative optimism. “The fact of a leaders’ meeting coming together has created space in the Chinese system, for reopening what we believe to just be simply ongoing work between our side to get things done,” a senior administration official told reporters before the meeting.
In what analysts called a “breakthrough,” Beijing and Washington said they would resume climate talks that had been frozen following House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s controversial visit to Taiwan, which Beijing claims as its own. The White House said the leaders “agreed to empower key senior officials to maintain communication and deepen constructive efforts.
