Biden and Xi Jinping to Hold Summit in San Francisco, USA on the 15th (Update)

U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping will hold a bilateral summit at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) event in San Francisco, USA, on the 15th (local time).

[Image source=Yonhap News]

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On the 8th, Japan's Kyodo News cited an anonymous senior U.S. government official reporting that the U.S. and China are in the final stages of preparations to hold the summit.

The media reported that the U.S.-China summit will take place on the first day of the APEC meeting, held from the 15th to the 17th of this month. If the bilateral meeting between President Biden and President Xi materializes, it will be their first face-to-face meeting in a year since the G20 summit held in Indonesia last year. China has not announced whether President Xi will attend APEC, but the White House previously stated that a U.S.-China summit would be held on the occasion of APEC.

Bloomberg News reported that President Xi is also likely to attend a dinner with American businesspeople scheduled next week in San Francisco. Amid Western companies' reluctance to invest in China due to the Chinese economic slowdown and U.S.-China tensions, the media said that one of President Xi’s main tasks during this visit to the U.S. will be to reassure foreign investors. Last month, President Xi also expressed his intention to attract foreign investment by declaring the complete removal of restrictions on foreign investment at the Belt and Road Forum.

Attention is focused on whether the summit will help partially restore the rapidly deteriorated bilateral relations since the Chinese reconnaissance balloon incident earlier this year. U.S.-China relations quickly froze after the U.S. imposed semiconductor export controls on China and the Chinese reconnaissance balloon incident in February. Since then, the U.S. has repeatedly emphasized that its China policy aims at "de-risking" rather than "decoupling," while dispatching high-level officials to China to resume dialogue efforts. At the end of last month, Wang Yi, member of the Chinese Communist Party Central Political Bureau and Foreign Minister, visited Washington D.C. and held a U.S.-China foreign ministers’ meeting, raising expectations for a possible summit between the two leaders in November.

However, it remains uncertain whether this summit will lead to an improvement in U.S.-China relations. Kyodo News reported that while the U.S. hopes to resume military-to-military talks to prevent accidental clashes with China, difficult issues such as the Taiwan question and U.S. semiconductor export controls remain unresolved.

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