China confirms Xi to attend G20 summit, meet Biden
Xi Jinping will attend the G20 summit in Indonesia next week and meet his US counterpart Joe Biden, Beijing’s foreign ministry confirmed on Friday, in their first in-person talks since the Chinese president sealed a historic third term as leader last month.
The two met prior to Biden taking office in January 2021 and have spoken by phone a number of times since then, but the Covid-19 pandemic and Xi’s subsequent aversion to foreign travel have prevented them from meeting in person.
Foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian told a regular press briefing Xi will meet Biden and French counterpart Emmanuel Macron next week in Bali, between November 14 and 17, as well as Senegal’s Macky Sall and Argentina’s Alberto Fernandez.
He will then travel to Thailand from November 17 to 19 to attend the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit, Zhao confirmed. The White House has already said Biden will meet Xi on Monday, when the “leaders will discuss efforts to maintain and deepen lines of communication”, as well as how to “responsibly manage competition and work together where our interests align”.
The US and China have a massive investment and trade relationship but are also challenging each other’s military and diplomatic influence, especially in the Asia-Pacific region.
On Wednesday, Biden said he has already made clear to Xi that he is “looking for competition, not conflict”, adding they will discuss Taiwan, but that the US stance on the island “has not changed at all”.
After almost three years of self-imposed pandemic isolation where international diplomacy was largely conducted via video link, China now aims to shore up its global alliances especially with developing countries in the face of increased competition with the US and a world destabilised by the Ukraine war. A flurry of state visits to China this month has highlighted the importance of maintaining trade and other diplomatic ties – even as China acts more assertively to defend its interests.
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His visit capped off a string of trips by the leaders of Pakistan, Tanzania and the Vietnamese Communist Party – the most numerous face-toface meetings Xi has conducted since hosting more than a dozen world leaders at February’s Beijing Olympics. France’s foreign minister last week said Macron is likely to visit China in the coming months.
"If we have close elections, particularly if they involve party control of the US Senate, disinformation will get worse," Rick Hasen, a professor and director of the "Safeguarding Democracy Project" at UCLA law school, told AFP.
"It has now become common among Trump's supporters to believe that election theft in the US is common, despite all reliable evidence to the contrary. And these kinds of claims could well arise again in close elections."
The disputes could set the stage for a prolonged period of uncertainty, particularly as more than half the Republican midterm candidates are "election deniers" who have repeated Trump's debunked claims of fraud in the 2020 polls.
"If candidates do not concede, or decide to litigate the election, this period will extend, with each day selecting some piece of election-day or counting-period evidence to amplify or extend," the EIP report said.