State leaders of China and the United States met on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) leaders’ meeting on Wednesday to discuss trade, Taiwan and other geopolitical issues.
Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Joe Biden had a face-to-face meeting at Filoli estate, a historical site in San Francisco. The two had not met each other since they had a talk in Bali, Indonesia a year earlier.
“Sino-US relations have not always been smooth, but the two countries still have to deal with each other,” Xi said in his opening speech at the meeting. “Confrontation is not a practical move. The earth can accommodate both China and the US.”
“Although the two countries have different development paths, as long as they adhere to mutual respect, peaceful coexistence and win-win cooperation, they can transcend their differences and find a way for the two countries to get along with each other,” he said. “The future of China and the US is bright.”
Biden said both China and the US should make sure that their competition will not lead to conflicts. He said both countries can work together in artificial intelligence and climate change issues.
Before the two leaders’ meeting, China and the US said in a joint statement that they recall, reaffirm, and commit to further the effective and sustained implementation of the April 2021 US-China Joint Statement Addressing the Climate Crisis and the November 2021 US-China Joint Glasgow Declaration on Enhancing Climate Action in the 2020s.
They said they decided to operationalize the Working Group on Enhancing Climate Action in the 2020s, to engage in dialogue and cooperation to accelerate concrete climate actions.
Win-win situation
On Tuesday and Wednesday, China’s state media published a series of articles, saying that the Xi-Biden meeting would help significantly improve Sino-US relations.
“We hope that the positive stance shown by the US in its recent interactions with China is not political calculation and tactic, and that the verbal commitments it has made will become concrete policies and substantive actions,” Xinhua said in a commentary on Wednesday.
“We also hope that the US will not be fettered by domestic party disputes and the selfish interests of politicians, and will work together with China to make long-term efforts to accumulate good news and momentum in China-US relations and promote the real stabilization and improvement of bilateral relations,” it said.
It said the general trend of the world is peace, development, cooperation and win-win situation, and that no country or group of countries can dominate world affairs alone.
Xinhua also said cooperation, not competition, should dominate the perception of Sino-US relations. It said if both sides define their entire relationship with competition, antagonism will continue to increase while the two nations will face a risk of slipping into the abyss of a “New Cold War.”
It said China and the US can boost bilateral trade, work together in the carbon neutrality and medical sectors and encourage mutual investment. It said China’s middle-class population will provide growth potential for American farmers.
Besides, the China Central TV said in an article that Xi had paid a lot of effort to encourage informal exchange between Chinese and US people over the past three decades. His effort included an invitation of the wife of late American physicist Milton Gardner to visit Fuzhou, where the scientist spent 10 happy years of his childhood, in 1992.
“We’re not trying to decouple from China. What we’re trying to do is change the relationship for the better,” Biden told reporters at the White House on Tuesday.
He said the US was wary of investing in China due to Beijing’s business practices, which require foreign investors to turn over their trade secrets.
He said that, by meeting with Xi, he wanted to get back on a “normal course of correspondence,” such as being able to have emergency phone calls or military talks whenever there is a crisis.
China’s ‘real problems’
In early 2023, political tensions between China and the US were heightened by the Chinese spy balloon incident, Taiwan matters and Washington’s chip exports ban against China. The two sides could only resume dialogues in May.
Xi’s US trip happened against a backdrop of China seeing a decline in its foreign direct investment (FDI) and exports this year. The Chinese economy is also facing deflationary risks.
On Tuesday, Biden said at a fundraiser in San Francisco that China has “real problems.”
“President Xi is another example of how re-establishing American leadership in the world is taking hold. They’ve got real problems,” he said, without further elaboration.
“Nations that have no problems do not exist in this world,” Mao Ning, a spokesperson of the Chinese Foreign Ministry, said in a regular media briefing on Wednesday in what may have been a retort to Biden’s remark. “China is confident that it can achieve better development and achieve brighter prospects,” she said. “It is hoped that the US can also seriously solve its own problems and bring better life to the American people.”
Prior to this, Biden said on August 10 that China’s economic situation was a ticking time bomb. He said China was in trouble as it had a slowing growth and high youth unemployment rate.
China’s FDI fell 14.7% year-on-year to about US$132.9 billion in the first nine months of this year. The figure is an estimation calculated by Asia Times with the FDI in renminbi terms.
In January-October, China’s exports fell 5.6% to US$2.79 trillion from the same period of last year. The country’s imports dropped 6.5% to US$2.11 trillion.
People also reduced spending due to falling or unstable income. In October, China’s consumer price index (CPI) fell 0.2% year-on-year, according to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS). It was the second contraction in prices since the last one in July.
NBS officials said falling consumer prices were a result of rising food supply and weaker demand after long holidays.
The Chinese economy has been hit by a property and local government debt crisis over the past two years. Many property developers were struggling to sell their apartments, return loans and finish their construction work.
The central government is going to issue 1 trillion yuan of sovereign bonds but the sum is only enough for local governments to pay the interest on their outstanding debt.
According to China’s Ministry of Finance, the outstanding amount of local government debt grew 15.1% to 35.06 trillion yuan at the end of last year from 30.47 trillion yuan a year earlier.
Read: End to decoupling tops China’s pre-summit demands
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