Biden to seek ‘red lines’ in talks with Xi
Joe Biden says he is going into his first face-to-face meeting with Xi Jinping as president ‘stronger’, after his party’s unexpected success in midterm elections
NUSA DUA, INDONESIA: US President Joe Biden said on Sunday he will seek to establish “red lines” in America’s fraught relations with Beijing in highstakes talks with Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping.
The superpower sit-down will come on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Indonesia on Monday, with leaders from the world’s 20 largest economies holding their biggest gathering since the pandemic.
Biden said he was going into his first face-to-face meeting with Xi as president “stronger”, after his Democratic Party’s unexpected success in midterm elections they had been forecast to lose heavily.
But the summit comes with Beijing and Washington’s rivalry intensifying as a more powerful and assertive China tries to disrupt the US-led international order.
The world’s two largest economies are at loggerheads on everything from trade to human rights in China’s Xinjiang region and the status of the self-ruled island of Taiwan, and Biden said he expected “straightforward discussions” with Xi.
“I know Xi Jinping, he knows me,” he told reporters in Phnom Penh where he met with Asian leaders before heading to the G20 on the Indonesian resort island of Bali. “We have very little misunderstanding. We just got to figure out what the red lines are,” Biden said.
The US president hopes to “come out of this meeting with areas where the two countries and the two presidents and their teams can work cooperatively on substantive issues”, national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters.
Strategy on North Korea
China is North Korea’s main ally and while Biden is not expected to make demands, he will warn Xi that further missile and nuclear build-up would mean the United States boosting its military presence in the region something Beijing bitterly opposes. Biden met South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida before flying to Bali, with the allies pledging a “strong and resolute response” to any North Korean nuclear test.
South Korean president said the North’s recent provocations showed its regime’s “nature against humanitarianism”, adding it had become more hostile and aggressive based on confidence in its nuclear and missile capabilities.
Kishida said Pyongyang’s actions, which included a recent firing of a ballistic missile over Japan, were unprecedented.
Kishida also took a swipe at China for what he called violations of Japan’s sovereignty in the East China Sea and said Beijing was responsible also for heightening regional tension in the South China Sea, a conduit for at least $3 trillion in annual trade.
At a separate news conference, Australian PM Anthony Albanese said his discussions the previous day with Chinese counterpart Li Keqiang were constructive, amid anticipation of a formal summit with Xi.
Putin skips G20 summit
The US-China talks will cast a long shadow over the first postpandemic G20, a reunion that Russian President Vladimir Putin has opted to skip. Putin sent his foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, who arrived on Sunday evening. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has made the trip to Bali logistically difficult and politically fraught, and while the war is not officially on the summit agenda, the conflict will dominate discussions.
Soaring energy and food prices have hit richer and poorer G20 members alike - and both are directly fuelled by Putin’s war. There is likely to be pressure on Russia to extend a deal allowing Ukrainian grain and fertiliser shipments through the Black Sea when the current agreement expires on November 19.