Yang Jiechi, director of the Foreign Affairs Office of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC), chided the U.S. side in Alaska: “The Chinese don’t eat this,” prompting many netizens in China to echo the sentiment. But while war-wolf diplomacy may please Zhongnanhai and nationalists, it may not be good for Xi Jinping‘s dream of becoming a great power. The Nikkei Asian Review senior editor Katsuji Nakazawa wrote earlier that Xi Jinping’s desire to travel to the United States in the party’s centennial year and establish a great power image on par with Joe Biden‘s is becoming increasingly impossible.
The first task for China is to make it possible for Xi Jinping to meet Biden as soon as possible,” Nakazawa said. The first priority for China is to get Xi Jinping to meet Biden face-to-face as soon as possible. If things go well, Xi is prepared to travel to the United States for such a dialogue.
Xi has an urgent reason to do so.
A little more than three months from now, on July 1, the Chinese Communist Party will hold historic celebrations to mark its 100th anniversary. If Xi is not able to sit down for a face-to-face meeting with the U.S. president by then, what will the outside world think of China’s relations with the United States? What would be the assessment of Xi’s foreign policy?
Therefore, this meeting must take place before July 1. From a purely domestic perspective, any first summit after that date would be meaningless for Xi.
Since Biden’s election in November, the Communist Party has made every effort to achieve close meetings between Xi and the new U.S. leader, Nakazawa noted. Politburo member Yang Jiechi, Foreign Minister Wang Yi, and indeed everyone with ties to the U.S. side has mobilized.
Xi had some success in U.S. diplomacy in the early days of his tenure. During his first visit as the Communist Party’s top leader in June 2013, he proposed to then-President Barack Obama a “new type of great power relationship between the two countries.
Although the Americans ultimately rejected the proposal, diplomacy stalled while Washington considered its game plan, giving China the opportunity to open up. Beijing quickly reclaimed land on coral reefs in the South China Sea, thus strengthening its foothold in the region.
When Trump became U.S. president in January 2017, Xi Jinping met with him in Florida two and a half months later.
But this year, the new U.S. administration has changed course. At Biden’s initiative, the U.S., Japan, India and Australia held their first videoconference summit on March 12. The U.S. also held separate “2 plus 2” talks with Japan and South Korea.
Nakazawa noted that the new White House team has been strengthening its alliances and building a united front before the talks with China in Alaska.
With the U.S. and China locked in a bitter confrontation, a crisis that has engulfed the European Union and Russia, it will be difficult to find common ground quickly between the two camps, Nakazawa noted. Unless the Communist Party makes unexpected concessions, Xi’s planned visit to the U.S. in June is likely to fall through.
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