US President Joe Biden will meet China’s President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the G20 Summit coming Monday in Bali, Indonesia and neither side is expecting any coolants to douse the fire of mutual distrust and anger. Rather, cold reactions are expected considering the contentious issues the US is bound to raise — Taiwan, human rights, and North Korea.
Amid renewed talks of a fresh cold war post-pandemic, Biden will come face-to-face with Xi for the first time since he became president. Xi, on his part, will meet Biden after assuming power for the third time at last month’s 20th party congress.
That positive mood of Xi’s is matched by Biden who managed to escape a rout in the US mid-term elections with the Republican Party failing to dominate the elections as expected and giving the Democrats a much-needed reprieve.
Biden flew out of the US on a confident note, hoping to impress upon XI that a long-fasting and refreshed relationship between the two countries is possible only by tackling contentious issues like human rights, democracy, and sovereignty.
The White House spokeswoman, Karine Jean-Pierre, said in a statement even as Biden was reading to fly out, “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, especially on transnational challenges”.
According to a US-based publication, Biden and Xi last met in person during the Obama administration, and US ties with China have since slumped to their lowest level in decades, most notably since US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s August trip to Taiwan, the self-governed democratic island that Beijing claims as its territory.
