WASHINGTON – United States President Joe Biden talked with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping for the first time in seven months yesterday, urging that they ensure “competition” between the two powers does not become “conflict”, the White House said.
During the call, Biden’s message was that the US wants to ensure “the dynamic remains competitive and that we don’t have any situation in the future where we veer into unintended conflict,” a senior US administration official told reporters.
This was the leaders’ first call since February, when they talked for two hours, shortly after Biden took over from Donald Trump.
US-China relations went into a nosedive under Trump, who launched a trade war between the world’s number one and two economies. Biden’s administration, while urging multilateralism and an end to Trump’s “America first” ideology, has kept trade tariffs in place and remains tough on other contentious areas of the relationship with Beijing.
However, the White House signalled that the diplomatic impasse is unsustainable and potentially dangerous, requiring intervention by the leaders in yesterday’s call.
“We welcome stiff competition but we don’t want that competition to veer into conflict,” the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told reporters.
The goal of the call was to set out “guardrails” so that the relationship can be “managed responsibly”.
Lower level attempts to engage with China have not gone well, especially at an angry March exchange between Secretary of State Antony Blinken and top Chinese officials when they met in Anchorage, Alaska.
“We have not been very satisfied with our interlocutors’ behavior,” the senior official told reporters.
Accusing the Chinese of being mostly “unwilling to engage in serious or substantive” talks, the official said “we don’t believe that that is how responsible nations act, especially given the global importance of the US-China competition”.
Faced with the impasse, “President Biden understood the importance of engaging President Xi directly,” the official said.
According to a readout from the White House after the call, Biden and Xi had a “discussed areas where our interests converge, and areas where our interests, values, and perspectives diverge”. – AFP, September 10, 2021
