Senior U.S. and Chinese officials have agreed to plan a phone call between President Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping in the coming weeks as part of efforts to stabilize fragile relations between Washington and Beijing.
The agreement for the summit call was reached during a meeting in Beijing on Wednesday between National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and China's top foreign affairs official, Wang Yi.
Sullivan is in China for a three-day conference. The call comes after Biden and Xi agreed to step up top-level communication between the two countries at a summit in Woodside, California, in November.
In a White House update on the meeting between Sullivan and Wang, the Chinese also agreed to hold “a theater commander telephone call in the near future.” A senior administration official who briefed reporters last week ahead of Sullivan's visit said restoring theater command-level communications was a key goal of the trip.
The US aims to resume military-to-military communications that were cut off by China following then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan in August 2022.
Sullivan is scheduled to hold a news conference Thursday after the meeting.
The White House said it did not expect any specific agreements or deliverables to come out of the talks, but that the talks were part of “responsibly managing competition and tensions.”
The Biden administration has sought to negotiate diplomatically with China on certain issues, even as relations between the two countries remain highly tense in some areas.
These include China's support for Russia's war in Ukraine, Chinese anger over U.S. support for Taiwan's military defense, U.S. concerns about what it calls China's unfair trade and economic practices, increasing Chinese provocations in the South China Sea, U.S. concerns about Americans detained in China, and human rights abuses by the Chinese government (which the United States perceives as committing genocide against Uighur Muslims in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region).
Biden has sought to avoid a military conflict by making restoring military communications a diplomatic priority with Beijing. The U.S. also sees working with China to crack down on exports of chemicals used to make the drug fentanyl as crucial to tackling the U.S. opioid epidemic.
The administration is also seeking to work with China to discuss the future of artificial intelligence, out of concern that poor regulation of the technology and control of its development poses significant security risks around the world.
“The purpose of this strategic-level communication is to hammer out the details of our strategic intent, our policy intent, how we view various situations,” a senior administration official said in a conference call with reporters last week. “Above all, the purpose is to clear up any misunderstandings and to avoid this competition turning into a conflict.”
