Joe Biden’s first meeting as U.S. president with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Bali, Indonesia, on Monday comes at a time of deep acrimony between the two superpowers over thorny issues such as Taiwan and trade.
And although it will be their inaugural face-to-face summit as heads of state, few world leaders have spent as much one-on-one time with Xi as Biden. While vice president, Biden was chosen as the point person to establish a personal relationship with China’s then next leader.
In the summer of 2011, Biden visited China for a six-day trip that included five meetings or engagements with Xi — official meetings, a formal dinner, a visit to a high school basketball practice in Sichuan Province and a no-tie casual dinner.
“The connection they made at that time is quite rare between leaders and is one of the few remaining hopeful features of the U.S.-China relationship,” said Daniel Russel, who accompanied Biden on the trip as senior director for Asia on the National Security Council.
The transcripts of those initial meetings formed the basis of America’s understanding of Xi and its policies toward him. But history has shown that Washington may not have fully grasped how assertive and impatient Xi would become, Nikkei Asia reported.
Monday’s summit comes after Xi secured his third term as China’s top leader and Biden’s Democratic Party avoided a major set back in the midterm elections. Unshackled from domestic political restraints, the two leaders have a clean slate to work with. The summit could set the tone of the bilateral relationship through to the 2024 U.S. presidential election.
U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters Thursday that Biden is eager to determine where China is headed.
“He will get to sit in the same room with Xi Jinping, be direct and straightforward with him as he always is, and expect the same in return from Xi. And then he can make his judgments on that basis about how to take things forward,” Sullivan said.
The U.S. had similar hopes 11 years ago.
In January 2011, when then-presidents Hu Jintao and Barack Obama met at the White House, the pair decided that their respective vice presidents would visit each other in the following months to establish personal trust.
When Biden arrived at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People that August, Xi thanked him for making the trip, noting, “I know you are very busy with national affairs at home.”
Biden replied: “You are national affairs.”
A meeting with Xi, the heir-apparent, was highly coveted by global leaders. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, South Korean President Lee Myung-bak and Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda all came to Beijing but left without a sit-down with the vice president.
Biden wanted to make the most of the opportunity and was thirsty for insight. When he walked off Air Force 2 in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province, he held in his hand “Ancient Chinese Thought, Modern Chinese Power,” a just-published book by Tsinghua University Professor Yan Xuetong, who was thought to be one of Xi’s foreign policy advisers.
Six months later, Xi made a reciprocal visit to the U.S., visiting Biden at the White House.
After his scheduled morning meeting with Xi, Biden offered to take his guest to the Oval Office for a courtesy call with Obama. That sit-down lasted 85 minutes, an unthinkable length for a meeting between a president and a vice president.
Ryan Hass, who was then a political officer at the U.S. embassy in Beijing, recalled the process in which the reciprocal visits happened.
“President Obama felt that [Biden] would be a good person to gain a deeper understanding of Xi’s worldview, but also to try to help inform Vice President Xi’s thinking with an awareness of America’s top priorities and concerns,” Hass told Nikkei Asia.
“The core message was that the United States welcomed the rise of a responsible China that acted in accordance with international rules and norms. As long as China works within the existing system, was not belligerent to its neighbors, there could be space for the United States and China to manage the relationship.”
Russel, who was involved in the planning of the two trips, said, “Even in 2011, in the aftermath of the Great Financial Crisis, it was important for U.S. side to impress on Xi the health, dynamism, and strength of the U.S. economy. We also wanted Xi to understand that the false narrative of ‘U.S. containment’ misrepresented the Obama administration’s approach.”
Xi made a reciprocal visit to the U.S. in February 2012 where he met U.S. President Barack Obama in the Oval Office for 85 minutes. © Reuters
Russel’s notes from these meetings, along with those of other White House staffers, were gathered to formulate a classified memorandum of conversation, or the official documentation, of the meetings. Those records, now in the National Archives, will one day be available to historians.
“It was clear to those of us in the meetings that Xi Jinping was a strong nationalist, a true believer in Marxist-Leninist doctrine, and was resolved to correct what he saw as the excesses of collective leadership and corruption in the Communist Party,” Russel said.
The determination to move away from collective leadership was on full display at the recently concluded national congress of the Chinese Communist Party, where Xi retired or demoted rivals and formed a dissent-free cabinet.
Hass acknowledged that the U.S. was too slow in understanding the ways in which Xi was departing from long-standing Chinese foreign policy orientation. “But,” he added, “it wasn’t like he pulled back the curtain and shared with us his grand strategy and we just chose to ignore it.”
When Hass later became China director on Obama’s National Security Council, he revisited all of those Biden-Xi meeting records to better understand the Chinese leader.
“He has defined just about everyone’s expectations inside and outside China, because as Xi was rising through the Communist Party system, he was notable for his agreeableness. He didn’t offend or alarm,” Hass said. “Looking at the body of his biographical work up to the period of him becoming president would be very difficult for anyone to assess that the Xi Jinping of today would have been evident at that point.”
Yet, in hindsight, there were some clues along the way.
When the U.S. offered multiple dates in July and August for Biden’s 2011 trip to begin, Xi is said to have personally chosen Aug. 17.
Aug. 17, 1982, was the day the U.S., under President Ronald Reagan, and China, under paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, signed the Third Communique, in which the U.S. vowed that it does not seek to carry out a long-term policy of arms sales to Taiwan.
“Taiwan and Tibet issues concern China’s core interests and are matters involving national feelings of 1.3 billion Chinese people,” Xi said, at his first meeting with Biden in Beijing.” Therefore they must be carefully and properly dealt with so as to protect China-U.S. relations from being interfered with and damaged.”
Xi was laying out the “guardrails” for the Biden-Xi relationship. He will reiterate the same talking points on Monday.
