Biden aims for farewell call with China’s Xi Jinping

President Joe Biden will speak with Chinese leader Xi Jinping “in the coming weeks,” the White House said Wednesday, likely the final one-on-one contact between the two leaders before November’s U.S. presidential election.

Plans for the call were hammered out in Beijing between Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and national security adviser Jake Sullivan, who is in China for three days of planned meetings. The upcoming call will be the two leaders’ second phone communication since their in–person meeting in California in November. Beijing confirmed plans for the call in a Foreign Ministry statement that said “a new round of interaction” between the two leaders will occur “in the near future.”

Sullivan and Wang also discussed the need for “concrete steps to tackle the climate crisis” during the upcoming visit to Beijing by John Podesta, Biden’s senior adviser for international climate policy. Climate experts say that U.S.-China alignment on the issue of climate finance — financial support for developing countries grappling with the negative impacts of climate change — is essential to the success of the United Nations COP29 conference in November.

Beijing signaled that it is open to more high-level U.S.-China communications in order to maintain stable ties. That will include video calls between U.S. and Chinese Indo-Pacific military commanders, and a second meeting of the U.S.-China intergovernmental dialogue on artificial intelligence “at an appropriate time,” the Chinese Foreign Ministry statement said.

Sullivan’s meeting with Wang Yi — his fifth since Wang reprised his role as China’s top diplomat last year — otherwise produced meager returns in terms of substantive agreement on key bilateral irritants. Sullivan ran through a list of key U.S. concerns — including tensions across the Taiwan Strait, China’s role in fueling the U.S. opioid overdose epidemic , Beijing’s support for Russia’s war on Ukraine and Beijing’s “destabilizing actions” toward the Philippines in the South China Sea — with no sign that Beijing is willing to do more to address those issues.

Beijing instead pushed back by demanding an end to U.S. arms sales to Taiwan, slamming Biden administration “illegal unilateral sanctions” on Chinese entities linked to supplying Moscow’s war effort and accusing Washington of using the U.S-Philippines Mutual Defense Treaty as “a pretext to undermine China's sovereignty and territorial integrity.”