US President Biden will meet Chinese President Xi at the APEC summit on Wednesday. It is an attempt at rapprochement after a relationship has reached a low point. There are plenty of topics – from the Gaza war to Taiwan.
The war in the Gaza Strip may currently be a priority for US President Joe Biden. But in the long term, China is considered the number one issue for the future – there is cross-party agreement on this in the USA.
The author Gordon Chang sees the USA and China in a “cold war” for technological supremacy in the world. And he sees the risk of a military confrontation, for example in the dispute over Taiwan’s independence. “China is building up its nuclear weapons stockpile at a rate rarely seen in history,” Chang told Fox News. In his view, the country will virtually quadruple its arsenal within a decade.
Cautious steps towards each other
The Biden administration has been trying to approach China again since the dispute over the alleged spy balloon that was shot down by the USA. The meeting between Biden and Xi Jinping was prepared for months:
“The president believes that nothing is more valuable than face-to-face conversation,” Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan told CNN. “The USA and China are competitors. President Biden is trying to manage this competition responsibly so that it does not turn into a conflict.”
Lots of construction sites – and the Taiwan question
Will the conversation between Xi and Biden bring tangible results? Most US China experts are skeptical. The most important thing is that the meeting takes place at all, says Colin Kahl, professor of international politics at Stanford University: “In part, the meeting itself is the message. And then it will be interesting to see whether there is progress on the big issues What Xi says about the conflict between Israel and Hamas.”
Biden will probably urge Xi to get China to influence Iran. This could prevent the conflict from spreading to the entire Middle East region, said Kahl. According to the professor, the same applies to the topic of Ukraine. Here Biden will urge that China no longer support Russia’s war of aggression.
Accidental collision of fighter jets?
And Biden will try to re-establish reliable bilateral communication channels between the US and Chinese militaries. The greatest danger at the moment is an unwanted military escalation. As an example, Kahl cited a possible collision between fighter jets over the South China Sea. US aircraft regularly fly patrols there.
“China’s reaction to this is that they present our control flights as a provocation, that they are coming dangerously close to us with their own fighter jets in order to push us out of the region altogether,” said Kahl. “But that won’t work because we have always carried out such flights in international airspace and will continue to do so. So there is a real risk of an incident.”
The new number one
In addition to the military, there is also a whole list of so-called smaller issues, emphasizes Oriana Skyler Mastro, China expert at Stanford University: “Things like an agreement on fentanyl. Most of the raw materials for this synthetic drug come from China. Progress on these so-called small ones Topics could, in turn, help make progress on the big, serious issues.”
For Mastro, the bottom line is the fundamental question: “Who is the world’s number one power today – the USA or China?” In the past, China focused primarily on its direct relationship with the USA. Meanwhile, Beijing’s main strategy is to get the developing and emerging countries of the global south on its side: “It really looks like we as the USA are now only a sideshow from the Chinese perspective. The main showpiece is increasingly China’s relationship with them developing countries.”
The internal problems of the USA
The APEC summit could also show how much the USA is currently struggling with internal problems: Biden will have to call Washington quite often in San Francisco in order to prevent a shutdown, a widespread standstill of government business, by the end of the week.
The president must negotiate the next budget with Republicans in the House of Representatives. Perhaps, US media speculate, Biden will even have to leave the APEC summit early.