When he meets Chinese general secretary Xi later today in the San Francisco Bay Area, President Biden might bring about the culmination of a yearlong foreign-policy shift: America’s return to an approach to China guided primarily by diplomatic engagement rather than competition.
By 2020, both parties seemed to have learned from bitter experience that the Chinese Communist Party is a threat to the United States. The Biden administration continues to pay lip service to the new consensus, saying that it is merely trying to manage the competition and deliberately avoiding the word “engagement.” And Biden has taken some useful steps, including the administration’s crackdown on China’s access to advanced chips and its work to build up U.S.-led alliances across the world.
Yet the concessions to Beijing have been piling up for nine months, ever since a U.S. fighter jet shot down a surveillance device that the People’s Liberation Army sent over the middle of the country. Somehow the administration took that Chinese provocation as a reason for us to be conciliatory. It has withheld measures critical to punishing officials complicit in genocide and to targeting Huawei, and it has kicked off a series of U.S.–Chinese official dialogues in which Beijing will no doubt seek to further delay or abort new sanctions and export controls. Even the U.S. Department of Agriculture is involved in this diplomatic full-court press; it sent a trade delegation to a forum in Shanghai two weeks ago.
The details of today’s meeting reflect an American eagerness to please. China reportedly demanded the meeting be held at an undisclosed location. It is getting its way. Chinese diplomats have pressured Washington to ensure that Xi will see no anti-CCP protesters out the window of his car during his meetings this week. The New York Times reports the White House is debating how to respond. (The answer should be a firm no, even if it led to Xi’s withdrawal from the meeting.)
The optimistic case for the Xi–Biden meeting is that the two leaders will achieve progress on a number of topics, including the use of artificial intelligence in military systems, China’s role in American drug fatalities, the war in Gaza, and, most important, getting the two countries’ top military officials speaking about reducing risk in the Indo-Pacific (something Beijing has blocked).
Any positive outcomes, though, are likely to be illusory. Xi famously lied to President Obama when he promised that China would not militarize the South China Sea, and China also clearly abrogated a hacking agreement it signed with the U.S. in 2015. In its annual report yesterday, the U.S.–China Economic and Security Review Commission put it aptly: Xi is just buying time as the party continues to pursue a historic military buildup and deal with economic and social problems at home. Its overall intentions remain malign. The Biden team is not acting as though it recognizes it.
President Biden should take a hard line in his conversations with Xi: demanding the release of political prisoners, deploring Beijing’s human-rights abuses, pledging protection for Taiwan, and sharply condemning the PLA’s increasingly dangerous interceptions of U.S. and Western jets and ships. If he were inclined to do that, though, it’s unlikely he would have set in motion this meeting in the first place.