The meeting will allow a resumption of military communications, but the American president declared that he still considered his Chinese counterpart as a “dictator”.
A first step. On Wednesday, November 16, Joe Biden and Xi Jinping reestablished a dialogue that had been pending for a year. But the two heads of state also exposed their differences in broad daylight, particularly on Taiwan. Tellingly, the American president said at the conclusion of a press conference, although intended to welcome the outcome of the summit, that he still considered his Chinese counterpart as a “dictator”.
“He is a dictator in the sense that here is a man who runs a country, a communist country, which is based on a form of government totally different from ours”, he clarified, using an expression that has angered Beijing in the past. The meeting will, however, lead to a resumption of high-level military communications, suspended for more than a year, the two superpowers said.
Friction over Taiwan
The four-hour summit, held in an opulent residence about forty kilometers from San Francisco, was “constructive and productive”, according to Joe Biden. The 80-year-old Democrat assured that the two men could pick up the phone and talk to each other “directly and immediately” in the event of a crisis. Because the meeting, intended to give an impression of newfound serenity, obviously did not resolve any substantive dispute.
The Chinese president has certainly agreed to take, according to the Americans, “a number of significant measures to significantly reduce supplies” into fentanyl components. This powerful synthetic opiate produced with chemical compounds originating in particular from China causes tens of thousands of overdoses each year in the United States. A welcome announcement for Joe Biden, regularly accused of not doing enough against drug trafficking.
Xi Jinping, faced with a degraded economic and social situation in China, does not want to appear weakened, particularly with regard to Taiwan. The status of the island, of which Beijing claims sovereignty, and where a presidential election will soon take place, remains a central subject of friction. Joe Biden asked him to “respect the electoral process”. The Chinese president, for his part, urged his counterpart to “stop arming Taiwan”since reunification is according to him “inevitable”.