The First President of the United States Meets China: Military Communications and the Emergence of a High-Level Military-to-Military Dialogue
President Biden is expected to announce agreements on military communication channels at a press conference after speaking with the Chinese leader for the first time a year.
A year ago today, the leaders met in Indonesia. In the U.S., as the election season kicks off, China has become an even more contentious foreign policy issue. According to a recent Chicago Council on Global Affairs survey, nearly 60% of Americans consider China’s development as a world power to be a critical threat.
Top among them is an agreement to resume high-level military-to-military dialogue. The communications were stopped after Nancy Pelosi arrived in Taiwan.
The two leaders emerged from the four-hour talks with agreements to cooperate and keep talking. The two of them agreed that they should be able to call and talk to eachother whenever they want.
What Do U.S. Governments Really Want to Tell China about Cold War, Extreme Nuclear Collisions and the Nuclear Heterogeneity?
It’s not known what China received from the agreement. Beijing has been pushing to have the U.S. drop sanctions against a forensics laboratory that the Trump administration says was involved in human rights abuses linked to China’s far western region of Xinjiang.
And conflicts in the Middle East and between Ukraine and Russia will also come up, he said, including Iran’s involvement in the war between Israel and Hamas.
It is not easy for Americans to comprehend China’s strength. It’s troubling to see the rise of a society of comparable power, operating under a value system that seems so different from America’s. The U.s. dollar, the dynamism of American science, and its military and diplomatic clout are just some of the enduring strengths of America. This means that U.S. leaders can afford to continue reaching out to China, to look past differences over those rules and boundaries laid down decades ago, to resist posturing for their electorates back home and start working together on things that matter to young people in both countries. Things like economic stability, job creation, healthy competition instead of decoupling, scientific collaboration and, above all, climate change.
The world gets a little hotter when we spend our time mired in distrust. Raised under the threat of climate change, younger generations in both countries intuitively understand that we need new, transformative approaches; that yelling at each other solves nothing. California is in the middle of a fire outbreak and knows that there are greater threats to their way of life than China. Shanghai’s people, living in a shallow river delta, could see their home washed away in a few decades. The resources that Beijing and Washington expend on an unwinnable geopolitical standoff could be far better used in our energy transition, or bringing better lives to people in the developing world.
What The Biden-Xi Talks Accomplished (and Didn’t): News on Silicon Valley, Microsoft, and Trian
Microsoft introduces its own A.I. chips. The semiconductors, which will be used in the company’s Azure cloud data centers, are the latest effort by the tech industry to reduce its dependence on chips from Nvidia for their artificial intelligence applications. On Wednesday, the shares in Arm surged 4 percent after it was announced that Microsoft uses Arm’s designs.
Another activist investor targets Disney. A report by 13D Monitor says that ValueAct Capital has a stake in the entertainment giant. Trian is attempting to shake up Disney in order to improve investor satisfaction with the company.
The Senate approves a spending bill that would keep the government open. President Biden can sign the measure if it keeps the government funded through the beginning of next year. But the bill excludes more contentious items, including aid for Ukraine and Israel, and Congress will have to negotiate again on funding in a few months.
Hamas and Israel appear to be close to a hostage deal. Israeli officials say the proposal will see the group freed in exchange for a halt in fighting and the release of about the same number of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons.
New U.S.-China Relations Revisited: A Conversation with Biden and Jinping at the DealBook Summit on Nov. 29
The DealBook Summit is on Nov. 29. The guests include Vice PresidentKamala Harris, as well as Musk, Jensen Huang and other people. You can apply to attend here.
Yet the dinner showed that many aren’t ready to quit China. The Lowy Institute, a think tank in Australia, said China is still important to multinational companies even after all of the de-risking talk. “They might not be investing as much, but they’re not getting out. And it’s a market they can’t ignore and have to try and manage.”
In China, the economic growth since then has been less impressive to many analysts. According to Yu Jie, a research fellow on China at the Chatham House think tank in London, the purpose of the visit was to send a welcome message to U.S. business leaders.
The two sides didn’t make much progress on banning artificial intelligence to manage their nuclear weapons, they just agreed to keep talking.
There were many they didn’t agree upon. U.S. export controls were intended to suppressChina, according to Xi. Biden hoped that Beijing could act as a peacekeeper in the Middle East, but this effort was unsuccessful.
SAN FRANCISCO — President Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping shook hands, took a stroll through a garden and generally made nice on Wednesday when they met face-to-face for the first time in a year.
“We are ready to continue our cooperation with the United States on panda conservation and do our best to meet the wishes of the Californians so as to deepen friendly ties between our peoples,” he said to loud applause.
The panda appeared to allay fears on one aspect of the U.S.-China relationship, even though it was not able to alter the trajectory of the relationship.
bilateral trade and investments are not counted as stabilizers in U.S.-China relations. There is a structural challenge unresolved, she said.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine continues to feature in high-level bilateral talks. At Wednesday’s meeting, Biden urged Xi to continue to withhold military support to Moscow.
Biden-Xi: The Biggest Problem in the Relationship between China and the Island: Towards Reunification with Taiwan
China banned the exporting of drugs such as Fentanyl in 2019. Most of the conjugate ingredients for the drug are from China. The new agreement will underpin a crackdown on companies selling precursors and pill presses.
A senior Biden administration official said the administration worked with Chinese government to target specific companies. “In many respects the proof is in the pudding here. These are important steps.
Biden said he and Xi also agreed to launch a dialogue around managing artificial intelligence. Beijing also decided to invite 50,000 young Americans to China on exchange and study programs in the next five years.
The issue of Taiwan featured prominently at Wednesday’s Biden-Xi meeting. According to a senior U.S. official, Xi underscored to Biden that Taiwan was “the biggest,” and “most potentially dangerous” issue in the relationship.
Ahead of Taiwan’s election in January, the island’s political candidates seem to be aware of the potential danger if things get out of control.
A senior administration official familiar with Wednesday’s conversation said Xi told Biden that China’s preference is for a peaceful “reunification” with the self-governed, democratic island.
According to the official tally, it was reported by the president that China was planning for military action against Taiwan in the 20th century. There are no such plans according to the administration official. The Chinese government has been contacted by NPR.
What will the meeting between the two major powers say about Vietnam’s nuclear ties? A few takeaways from Biden versus Van Thuong
The entire country of Vietnam is tuning in to watch the Biden- Xi meeting, President Vo Van Thuong said on Tuesday at an event in San Francisco.
“If the two major powers cannot work together, it will negatively affect the region,” he said through an interpreter.
“They may not like what they say to each other, they may not like what they hear, and they may not resolve all the key issues that divide them. But if they’re not engaging, if they’re not talking, if they’re not involved in some sort of mechanism to air grievances or ask for clarifications, then the possibilities of miscalculation and mishaps, in my view, goes up. Neither side wants that.
“You can be cynical and say that talking and engaging and having discussions are not going to solve problems, and you wouldn’t be far wrong. Not talking to each other is no longer a low-risk proposition, according to Dave Finkelstein, director for China and Indo- Pacific Security Affairs at the Center for Naval Analyses.
But beyond the positive spin, can this meeting help alter the trajectory of the bilateral relationship? Here are a few take-aways from Wednesday’s meeting.
On Wednesday evening, Biden told a news conference that he had not shied away from taking a tough tone with his Chinese counterpart. He said that he was a “dictator” to his Chinese counterpart.
“That‘s been worrisome,” Biden said. “That’s how accidents happen.” Administration officials say this has been a top issue during talks with China and that there was finally an agreement to get the talks back up and running.