The White House said the two sides had “frank, substantive and constructive” discussions on a range of bilateral, regional and global issues.
“Both sides welcomed ongoing efforts to maintain open lines of communication, including the scheduling of a leaders’ conference call in the coming weeks,” he said in a readout of the Sullivan-Wang meeting.
A statement from the Chinese Foreign Ministry said the two sides “discussed a new round of interaction between the two heads of state in the near future.”
Both sides said there were also plans to hold a call between their respective military commanders. Xi agreed to resume military-to-military communications last year, after suspending them in 2022 in response to a visit to Taiwan by California Democratic Representative Nancy Pelosi, then speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.
The Biden administration has sought to “responsibly manage” competition with China while seeking areas of cooperation, such as climate change and international illicit drug trafficking. But relations between the two countries hit their lowest point in decades early last year, after a Chinese spy balloon appeared over North America and was shot down by the U.S. military.
In an attempt to stabilize relations, Sullivan and Wang have held a series of behind-the-scenes meetings since last year. They met in Vienna in May 2023, Malta in September and Bangkok in January. Wang also traveled to Washington in October to meet with Biden.
But it was Sullivan’s first trip to China as national security adviser and the first by a national security adviser since Susan Rice toward the end of the Obama administration in 2016. Rice was also the last national security adviser to meet with a vice chairman of the Central Military Commission.
“We are working to ensure that competition does not turn into conflict and that we find ways to work together where our interests align,” Sullivan said after arriving in Beijing on Tuesday.
Biden and Xi have spoken only once by phone since November, during a four-hour meeting in California on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) leaders’ meeting. With face-to-face contact so rare, the two leaders have few opportunities to interact one-on-one before Biden leaves the White House early next year.
The two men reached agreements in several areas during their talks in November, including counternarcotics, military-to-security communications and artificial intelligence risks. The White House said Sullivan and Wang discussed next steps in implementing those agreements.
China announced on Wednesday that a second round of U.S.-China talks on AI are planned.
The two men also discussed cooperation in other areas, such as the repatriation of undocumented migrants and climate change. China and the United States are the world’s two largest emitters of greenhouse gases.
Without specifying a date, the White House statement mentioned an upcoming trip to China by John Podesta, who recently succeeded John Kerry as U.S. special envoy for climate.
