Presidents Joe Biden and Xi Jinping have held a three-and-a-half-hour-long video conference. The summit offered one positive result but also underlined China's delusional aspiration for U.S. relations.
The mutual win came with both leaders' pledge to bolster their personal relationship and ensure better lines of communication. That matters in light of rising military tensions in the East and South China seas. The risk of miscalculation and undesired escalation can be mitigated by greater contact and trust between the two leaders. This is particularly important for Xi, whose subordinates sometimes fail to inform him accurately on U.S. actions and intentions. Paranoia is a very dangerous ingredient when the People's Liberation Army and U.S. military are in regular, close, and contested contact. If Xi feels more confident that Biden does not seek conflict, and that he can pick up the phone — or direct another official to do so — to gain clarification in a tense moment, that's a good thing.
Beyond deconfliction, however, the summit doesn't appear to have altered the fundamental challenge in U.S.-China relations. Namely, China's view of "cooperation" as a byword for "do what we want."
Encouraged by the Obama administration's eight years of appeasement, the Chinese Communist Party has been shocked and disheartened by the speed and durability with which the Trump and Biden administrations have shifted policy with regard to Beijing. No longer is the United States content with accepting Chinese trade as a payment for excusing intellectual property theft, human rights violations, territorial and political imperialism, and trade manipulation. China wants to go back to the good days, when Xi and President Barack Obama frolicked in the California countryside.
The Communist Party Standing Committee (which sat alongside Xi at the summit) still holds to the hope that this is possible.
This is best encapsulated by three principles Xi asked Biden to embrace: mutual respect, peaceful coexistence, and win-win cooperation. These principles sound eminently reasonable, and are designed for American consumption as such. But translated into Communist intent, they entail Biden's silence on human rights issues such as the Uyghur genocide, Beijing's effort to dominate Taiwan, and China's seizure of the South China Sea. Xi's rationale is that these are China's domestic concerns as much as gun violence is a U.S. domestic concern.
Moreover, what Xi leaves out here is that he's quite happy to interfere in U.S. domestic affairs when it suits him. China's immense influence over U.S. sports and entertainment is a striking example. As is China's moral bribery of U.S. corporate giants. Take the confectionery giant Mars, for example. CEO Grant Reid revels in public climate activism, but don't ask him to comment on Chinese human rights. Reid's activism ends at the doorway to the Communist Party elite. The same hypocrisy applies to the dealings with China of other U.S. multinationals such as Coca-Cola, Dell, Merck, Johnson & Johnson, and GE.
This dynamic reflects China's broader interest in unilaterally shaping what phrases such as "mutual respect" and "win-win cooperation" actually entail. Two examples stand out from the Chinese domestic-facing state media's report on the summit.
First, the report says that Xi explained that the "U.S. should stop abusing and generalizing the concept of national security to suppress Chinese companies." What China wants is for the U.S. to lift restrictions that prevent Chinese companies from acquiring or stealing U.S. intellectual property that can then be used against U.S. interests. As with Huawei, China wants the U.S. to allow its corporations to lay the groundwork for global intelligence collection. For all Xi's pledges to stop stealing stuff, Chinese policy plans make clear that the espionage-theft game is only escalating.
Or consider climate change, which the U.S. wants China to consider as a singular issue of global concern. Xi pretends to adopt that attitude in public, primarily to woo the European Union. Still, the all-powerful Chinese leader's ultimate intent is different. He wants to leverage carbon-reduction action in return for U.S. concessions in other areas. Money, for example. According to state media, Xi told Biden that "China is still the largest developing country in the world, and the problem of unbalanced and insufficient development is very prominent. ... Developed countries should earnestly fulfill their historical responsibilities and due obligations."
Here we see China's manipulation game. The Biden administration's climate czar John Kerry claimed a major carbon emissions victory by agreeing to a joint declaration with China at the recent COP26 climate summit. But China's reference to being a "developing country" and demanding "due obligations" is code for: "America better pay us for acting to cut emissions."
There's one final point to note. While the summit appears to have cooled tensions over Taiwan, China has a material interest in avoiding U.S. efforts to bolster Taiwan over the next year or two. In that sense, Biden would make a grave error were he to mitigate U.S. support for Taiwan in the belief it might assist U.S. interests with China in other areas.
