US, China senior officials agree to Biden-Xi call in coming weeks

Senior officials from the U.S. and China agreed to plan for a call between President Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping in the coming weeks, part of efforts to stabilize the fragile relationship between Washington and Beijing.

The agreement for a leader-level call came during a meeting Wednesday in Beijing between national security adviser Jake Sullivan and China’s top foreign affairs official Wang Yi. 

Sullivan is participating in meetings over the course of three days in China. The call would follow agreements between Biden and Xi reached at a summit in Woodside, Calif., in November 2023 to increase communication between the two sides at the top level. 

China also agreed to hold a “theater commander telephone call in the near future,” the White House said in a readout of the meeting between Sullivan and Wang. A senior administration official, briefing reporters last week ahead of Sullivan’s trip, said restoring communication lines on the theater commander level was a key goal of the trip. 

The U.S. has sought to reestablish military-to-military communication that the Chinese had severed in the wake of a visit to Taiwan by then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) in August 2022.

Sullivan is expected to host a press conference Thursday following the conclusion of the meetings.

The White House did not expect specific concrete agreements or deliverables to emerge from the meetings but said they were about “responsibly managing competition and tensions.” 

The Biden administration has sought to engage diplomatically with China on specific issues, even as the relationship is extremely strained over several areas. 

This includes China’s support for Russia’s war in Ukraine; China’s anger over U.S. support for Taiwan’s military defense; U.S. concern over what it describes as China’s unfair trade and economic practices; increasing Chinese provocations in the South China Sea; U.S. concerns over Americans detained in China; and the Chinese government’s human rights abuses — with the U.S. recognizing the government as carrying out a genocide against Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang. 

Still, Biden has sought to guard against military confrontation by making restoring military-to-military communication a priority area of diplomacy with Beijing. The U.S. has also viewed working with the Chinese to crack down on the export of precursor chemicals for the drug fentanyl as a crucial piece of addressing the opioid epidemic in the U.S. 

The administration is also trying to work with China to discuss the future of artificial intelligence over concerns that failure to regulate and manage the development of the technology will present major security and safety risks across the globe.

“The purpose of this strategic level of communication is really to get into details on how our strategic intent, intent of policy, how we see different situations,” the senior administration official said in the call with reporters last week. “It really is about clearing up misperceptions and avoiding this competition from veering into conflict more than anything else.”