Heads of State of China and the United States will meet face-to-face on November 15 to discuss the trade war, technology bans, geopolitical issues and Taiwan matters.
They will meet on the sideline of the APEC Summit, which will be held in San Francisco on November 15-17, Kyodo News reported Wednesday.
Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Joe Biden last met in Bali in Indonesia on November 14, 2022.
During Xi’s trip next week, top US business executives will be invited to have dinner with him on November 15, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday.
It is expected that Xi will use this chance to call on US firms to invest in China, which has been suffering from capital outflows this year.
Dinner with Xi
As the guest of honor, Xi will deliver a major speech at a gala dinner co-hosted by the National Committee on US-China Relations and the US-China Business Council.
Each participant will have to pay US$2,000 to attend the event. Companies can purchase eight seats at a table plus one seat at Xi’s table for US$40,000.
“The China-US relationship is the most important bilateral relationship in the world. How China and the US get along will determine the future of humanity,” Xi told the bipartisan delegation of the US Senate led by Majority Leader Chuck Schumer in Beijing on October 9.
“I have said many times, including to several presidents, that we have a thousand reasons to improve China-US relations, but not one reason to ruin them,” he said.
Xi’s comments were made against the backdrop of a decrease in China’s foreign direct investment (FDI) by 14.7% year-on-year to about US$132.9 billion in the first nine months of this year.
China’s Ministry of Commerce has stopped stating the country’s FDI in dollar terms since August. The 14.7% decline is an estimation calculated by Asia Times with the FDI in renminbi terms.
In addition direct investment liabilities, a gauge of FDI, stood at minus $11.8 billion in the third quarter, compared with US14.1 billion in the same period of last year, according to data published by the State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE) on November 3.
The negative quarterly figure, the first time since 1998, means that China is struggling to attract foreign companies and investments.
A rough road ahead
“The two sides have agreed to work together for the meeting between the two Presidents in San Francisco,” Wang Wenbin, a spokesperson of China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said in a media briefing on Wednesday.
“In the meantime, it won’t be plain sailing to San Francisco, nor can we leave it to autopilot to get us there,” he said. “The two sides need to return to what was agreed between the two Presidents in Bali and truly act on it.”
From Beijing’s perspective, the US has failed to implement the consensus achieved by Xi and Biden in the Bali meeting over the past one year. Beijing described the consensus as “five noes” and “four no-intentions.”
The “five noes” refer to Biden’s promises that the US will not seek to start a new Cold War, to change China’s system, to revitalize alliances against China, to support Taiwan’s independence or to support two Chinas or “one China on Taiwan.” The “four no-intentions” mean that the US has no intention of having a conflict with China, seeking to de-couple with China, obstructing China’s economic developments or containing China.
Since the Bali meeting, Chinese officials have repeatedly said that the US must satisfy China’s “reasonable concerns” or “five demands,” which include US cancelation of the extra tariffs imposed on Chinese goods, sanctions against Chinese companies, investment restrictions against China’s high-technology sectors, chip export controls and Xinjiang product bans imposed by the US.
“In order to realize a Sino-US summit in San Francisco, the US must meet a series of reasonable concerns and requirements of China,” Bao Ming, a retired military officer of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), says in an article published on Tuesday.
“It’s the US, not China, that failed to keep its promises,” he says.
But he recognizes some genuine political constraints on how far Biden can go: “The Biden administration has tried to improve its relations with China but faced strong domestic resistance.”
Bao says it’s difficult for Biden to soften his stance on trade, the high-technology bans, Taiwan, Ukraine or South China Sea issues due to huge political pressure from Republicans and even Democrats.
“Only a major emergency event comparable to the Pearl Harbor incident or the 9/11 incident can help Biden clear the political obstacles and make the common interests between China and the US outweigh their differences,” he says.
He adds that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, which could turn into a large-scale regional war, can become an opportunity for China and the US to start cooperating with each other.
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Follow Jeff Pao on Twitter at @jeffpao3