Biden opens direct line to Xi amid Taiwan tensions

Biden’s call with Xi Jinping has eased tensions between the superpowers in the Asia-Pacific.

Joe Biden and Xi Jinping on their video call this week. Picture: Reuters

The world became a little bit safer this week, especially for anyone living in or near the Asia-Pacific, a part of the world increasingly anxious about a confrontation between China and the US.

The virtual meeting between presidents Joe Biden and Xi Jinping, while hardly producing any groundbreaking agreements, got the two most powerful men in the world, leaders of the two most powerful nations and adversaries, talking to each other.

The likelihood of an imminent confrontation over Taiwan, which Beijing sees as a wayward province that must be reincorporated into the mainland, must be less than it was a week ago, if only very marginally.

It was their third conversation this year, and the first where they could see each other.

“The two leaders really did have a substantial back and forth and the ability to interact in a way they haven’t had in their phone calls,” a senior Biden administration official told journalists immediately after the video call.

“They didn’t just stick to a script in front of them … They recounted stories, points of agreements and disagreement, quoting each other’s words.”

The meeting was cordial; Xi, 68, hailed the US President as an “old friend” after Biden, 79, expressed hope their next meeting would be “face-to-face like we used to when we travelled through China”.

Biden wore a red tie, China’s favourite colour, while Xi wore a blue tie, the colour associated with the Democrats.

It was a totally different atmosphere to the frosty haranguing that top Chinese officials dealt out to Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Anchorage, Alaska, earlier this year, where the officials met in person.

The US had two – very modest – objectives going into this week’s call, and it more or less achieved them.

First, the Americans wanted to ensure they had a direct line to Xi, whose increasingly autocratic and unilateral style of governing has made discussions with more junior functionaries, even very senior ones, less valuable.

The White House had hoped Biden could talk to Xi at the G20 summit in Rome or the COP26 conference in Glasgow, but Xi hasn’t left China since the start of the pandemic early last year.

“The officials in Anchorage had uncertain proximity to Xi himself, in a system that’s moved quite decidedly from collective rule to one-man rule,” says Richard Fontaine, director of the Centre for New American Security, a leading Washington think tank.

Second, the administration wanted to establish “guardrails” on China’s behaviour by thrashing out some practical limits on China’s increasingly belligerent behaviour in relation to the South China Sea, Taiwan, and the extent of its economic coercion against other nations, including Australia.

“The relationship is the same after the call as it was before; what’s different is the potential to have some kind of talks on guardrails,” Fontaine says. “But my understanding is none of that actual talking took place – it was talking about talking.”

Unlike Xi, Biden has substantial domestic political considerations to worry about.

If he is seen to be helping or too close to the Chinese, he’ll be attacked by his political opponents at home.

Moreover, he came to the meeting at the weakest point so far in his presidency, with low and falling approval ratings and the high likelihood Democrats will lose control of congress in less than a year.

Xi, by contrast, is looking forward to an unprecedented third term in power.

“The White House really wanted to keep expectations low, didn’t want to use the term summit or even dialogue; they seemed to be frightened as to how this could harm Biden politically,” says Bonnie Glaser, director of the Asia program at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

“Both sides laid out very clearly what their positions are on Taiwan; that’s helping to create a degree of stability, but it doesn’t remove the problem.”

It’s not clear what China’s goals at the meeting, which the US requested, were. “Even though the Chinese don’t buy into the fact the relationship is dominated by competition, Xi does seem to agree that there should be more top-level involvement,” says Glaser.

“The White House sees this over time as creating a new equilibrium in the US-China relationship,” she adds. “The models of the past didn’t work and the Chinese are deeply uncomfortable with that.”

The White House was worried that China would spin the meeting to make Biden look weak, and it did.

Chinese television showed images of Biden taking notes while Xi lectured him soon after, and its media reported how the US said it opposed Taiwanese independence, when Biden had stressed the opposite.

A 550-page report by the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission released a couple of days after the virtual meeting laid out the extraordinary growth in Chinese economic and military power in recent years.

It is inevitable that China will have the ability to quickly invade Taiwan in coming years. Only diplomacy is going to be able to prevent it, or changes in China’s attitude.

The worst-case scenario for the US, in the still unlikely event of a war over Taiwan, is a “lightning grab” of Taiwan across the strait.

“Then an American president would be faced not with China about to attack Taiwan but China already in possession of Taiwan – and would you be willing to risk nuclear war to get them off,” says Fontaine.

Taiwan itself will play as much of a role in the peace of the region as the US and China. Xi made it clear any Taiwanese “provocation”, such as another referendum, would be met with a swift response.

In 2004, the island democracy enraged China, and the US, by conducting an independence referendum.

“Taiwan learned its lessons from that, and under this president I don’t think anyone is worried about it; she’s cautious, prudent and consistent – but we don’t know what’s around the corner in 2024,” says Glaser.