U.S., China discuss future talks between Biden, Xi

BEIJING – Senior American and Chinese officials meeting in Beijing discussed plans for a call between President Joe Biden and China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, as well as talks between their military commanders in the region, as the two countries work to stabilize relations.

The White House said in a statement after the talks Wednesday that the countries were “planning for a leader-level call in the coming weeks.”

Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, and Wang Yi, China’s top foreign policy official, met for nearly 11 hours over two days, the fifth round of negotiations in less than 18 months between the two top officials. They met at Yanqi Lake, a resort on the outskirts of Beijing, near the Great Wall.

The Biden administration has sought to smooth over tensions with China while continuing to turn up the pressure by curbing China’s access to the U.S. economy and technology. The meetings between Sullivan and Wang, following talks between Biden and Xi last November in California, are also aimed at showing that the rival powers can manage their differences.

“This is a mature and unusually candid channel. Sullivan and Wang have spent a lot of time together over the last year, and that has created some stability even as the relation has grown significantly more competitive,” said Rush Doshi, a former Biden administration official now at the Council on Foreign Relations, who participated in four earlier meetings between Sullivan and Wang.

One big question in the discussions is how or when the two leaders might talk in the coming months. They are running out of time to schedule the next meeting as Biden is preparing to leave office in January.

China said there had been discussion of a “new round of interaction between the two heads of state in the near future.”

Both sides said they had agreed to a video call between their top military commanders in the region. The United States said that such a call would be held in the “near future,” but China was more noncommittal, saying that it would take place “at an appropriate time.” Adm. Dong Jun, China’s defense minister, met with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in May in Singapore.

“This theater-command-level dialogue is essential for crisis prevention but has been resisted by the Chinese military,” said Danny Russel, a diplomacy and security analyst at the Asia Society Policy Institute. But while the two sides did agree on an initial call, they did not establish the ongoing line of high-level communication between the countries’ militaries that the Biden administration has sought.

Sullivan is also scheduled to meet Thursday with Gen. Zhang Youxia, vice chairman of China’s Central Military Commission, which oversees China’s military. That would be the first meeting between a Biden administration official and a vice chairman of the commission, which is led by Xi.

The United States has long sought more contact between the two countries’ militaries, in the hope that improved links might reduce the risk of miscommunication in case of a future crisis.

Worries about possible miscommunication or escalation during a conflict have increased as China has deployed military forces ever closer to longtime American partners in the region like Taiwan, Japan and the Philippines.

Just on Monday, a Chinese military surveillance plane breached Japanese territorial airspace for the first time, according to Japan, for unclear reasons. A Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson said Wednesday that the two countries were discussing the matter and that “Chinese military aircraft have no intention of intruding into the airspace of any country.”

China’s regional and global ambitions are one of the points of contention between the United States and China. The Chinese statement after the meetings between Sullivan and Wang said that the two sides should have a “correct understanding” of the relationship in order to peacefully coexist – phrasing that China uses to mean that the United States should not regard China as seeking to dominate the world.

Yun Sun, the director of the China program at the Stimson Center, a research group in Washington, said the Chinese statement indicated that Beijing was using Sullivan’s visit to “present an image of the U.S. ‘correcting its attitude,’ ” therefore enabling China to agree to stabilize relations.

The Chinese statement also emphasized Beijing’s unhappiness with American technology export controls and its stance on Taiwan, an island democracy that China claims as its territory.

The White House statement said American officials urged China to work with the United States to fight trafficking in narcotics that end up on American streets, and it raised concerns over the detention of American citizens in the country.

Brad Setser, a former economic policymaker in the Biden and Obama administrations, said that the two countries appeared to have made more progress on security issues than on the many economic disputes that divide them.

The United States has been pressing China to slow its heavy recent investments in new factories, contending that they would cause overcapacity. China has denied that overcapacity is a problem.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.