Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi (R) shakes hands with U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan at Yanqi Lake in Beijing on August 27, 2024.
Ng Han Guan | Afp | Getty Images
BEIJING — U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping are expected to speak by phone in the “coming weeks,” the White House said Wednesday.
The announcement comes as U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan travels to Beijing this week to meet with Wang Yi, China’s top diplomat.
Both sides said their military leaders would also hold a telephone conversation in the near future.
Chin added that preparations were underway for the second round of China-U.S. talks on artificial intelligence. The White House said John Podesta, the president’s senior adviser on international climate policy, would visit China soon, without specifying a date.
In official accounts of Sullivan’s trip, both countries maintained their positions on technology restrictions, Taiwan, the South China Sea and Ukraine.
Biden will not run again in November’s election, handing the nomination to his vice president, Kamala Harris. The White House statement did not name the presidents, but instead referred to plans for a “leadership-level call.”
The Chinese side’s statement used its usual “two heads of state” language and said the two sides were discussing a “new round of interaction,” according to a Chinese translation by CNBC.
Biden and Xi had a nearly two-hour phone call in early April, after the two leaders were scheduled to meet in November 2023 on the sidelines of a summit in Woodside, California.
High-level communication between the world’s two largest economies has not been easy in recent years amid heightened tensions and Covid-19 restrictions.
Then-Speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan in August 2022 and a high-profile “balloon incident” in February 2023 further strained relations, putting some planned talks on hold.
First visit by a US security adviser since 2016
Sullivan arrived in Beijing on Tuesday, concluded two days of meetings with Wang on Wednesday and is expected to leave on Thursday. This is his first trip to China as national security adviser, despite multiple meetings with Wang in recent years.
The last official trip to China by a national security adviser to the US president was in 2016, when Susan Rice visited Beijing under the Obama administration.
Although the outcome of November’s presidential election remains uncertain, getting tough on Beijing is a rare issue on which both American political parties agree.
Phil Gordon, Harris’ current national security adviser, said in May at a Council on Foreign Relations event that the “China challenge” was much bigger than Taiwan and required ensuring that Beijing “does not have the advanced technology, intelligence and military capabilities that can challenge us.”
