U.S. President Joe Biden has invited Chinese Communist Party President Xi Jinping to attend an international climate summit scheduled for April 22-23. A few days before that, the Boao Forum for Asia will hold its annual meeting in Hainan. Xi is likely to attend and take the opportunity to meet with U.S. officials first. This series of moves will set the tone for future relations between the Biden Administration and Beijing. For now, Washington is sending signals of weakness, while Beijing is trying to expand its circle of friends by joining forces.
The international climate summit will be conducted by video due to the Epidemic. The White House announced the list of invited leaders on March 26, including Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin and 40 others. But the White House did not specify what form the invitation was. Only Biden said on March 27 that the Chinese and Russian leaders already knew they were invited.
According to the Wall Street Journal, China has proposed to hold a “Xi-Biden meeting” via video on the sidelines of the summit. If true, this is seen as a sign that Washington has returned to compromise with Beijing after the full-scale resistance to the Communist Party under Trump. Beijing, for its part, could spin this as a point of “co-rule” between the Communist Party and the West.
In the aftermath of the Alaska talks, observers speculated that Beijing and Washington were taking a “military first, then military second” approach, attacking each other on the surface while gradually easing relations in the dark.
Sure enough, Secretary of State Antony Blinken first hinted that he would not punish Beijing for the Communist Party virus, and then told foreign journalists at a March 29 web briefing that the relationship between the United States and China is “competitive in some places, cooperative in others, and adversarial in others. “.
This is a softening from the previous President Trump’s outright statement that the Chinese Communist Party is the biggest enemy of the United States, and the previous Secretary of State Pompeo‘s explicit reference to the Chinese Communist Party as a threat to the United States and the free world as a whole, and is a re-characterization of the Biden administration’s approach to U.S.-China relations and the Chinese Communist Party.
Beijing laughed at the Biden administration’s softening of its stance and directly set the theme of this year’s Boao Forum for Asia as “The Great World Change: Sharing Global Governance and Playing the ‘One Belt, One Road’ Voice,” stating explicitly that the CCP’s goal is to work with the former world hegemon, the United States and the The Chinese Communist Party’s goal is to join the United States and the West in global governance.
Meanwhile, Beijing continues to expand the circle of friends that Trump has mostly stifled: China and Russia threatened to withdraw from the dollar system in a joint statement; Wang Yi completed a 25-year cooperation agreement with Iran last week; and on March 30, the Chinese Foreign Ministry announced that four ASEAN foreign ministers will visit China between March 31 and April 2: Singapore Foreign Minister Vivian, Malaysian Foreign Minister Hishammuddin, Indonesian Foreign Minister Retno, and Philippine Foreign Ministers of Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines.
The New York Times, which was criticized for its article calling on the Biden administration to shake hands with Beijing, said in another article on March 30 that China has recently launched a series of diplomatic activities, trying to include Russia, Iran and even traditional Middle East allies of the U.S. in its own alliance, which fully demonstrates Beijing’s desire to challenge the U.S.-led international order, build an anti-U.S. alliance and assume leadership. “The world is increasingly polarized into different camps, and both China and the United States want to attract supporters.”
Former Harvard University director and current commentator Dowry retweeted the article, which is tantamount to speaking for the Beijing regime, and angrily criticized: “It’s only been a few days since Biden took power, and even the New York Times has issued such a report. Trump even said yesterday, when I was on stage, when did they dare to talk to us like this? …The far-left forces within the United States have destroyed their own Wall, with mediocre people in high places, taking the initiative to pass the knife outward, before foreign forces took advantage of the opportunity to leap into action.”
Boao Forum for Asia Secretary General Li Baodong already said at a March 30 press conference that Communist leaders would go to Hainan in April to attend the opening and closing ceremonies of the annual meeting and to start dialogue activities with the U.S. side. He did not specify which leader it would be. There is speculation that Xi Jinping has a better chance.
The Boao Forum is usually China’s first major diplomatic event after the Communist Party’s two annual sessions, and Xi may see it as an opportunity to show that “Time and power are on our side” in order to consolidate his position of power as the party celebrates its centennial this year.
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