US President Joe Biden said on Wednesday he is likely to talk with Chinese President Xi Jinping within the next week and a half and expressed some doubt about whether House Speaker Nancy Pelosi would visit Taiwan.
“I think I’ll be talking to President Xi within the next 10 days,” Biden told reporters in Washington after they travelled with him on a one-day trip to Massachusetts.
The call between Xi and Biden would come months after their last virtual summit in March. It would be the second direct meeting between the two since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the first since their defence chiefs escalated rhetoric aimed at each other at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore.
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Biden’s claim in May that the US would intervene militarily if Beijing attempted to reunify Taiwan with the mainland by force set the scene for that forum, where Chinese Defence Minister General Wei Fenghe dismissed “the so-called Taiwan Relations Act“.
That law is cited nearly every time Biden administration officials explain US policy towards China. It authorises Washington to support the island’s military defence capacity.
Always a source of bilateral tension, Taiwan had loomed larger recently, even before Biden’s comments about defending the self-ruled island. Beijing has accused Washington of changing its stance on the issue through greater engagement with officials in Taipei.
In response, the mainland’s military has stepped up incursions into Taiwan’s air defence identification zone, a persistent effort to stop the island’s government from further bolstering ties with the US or any other countries.
Those tensions flared again recently on reports that Pelosi planned to visit the island.
However, when asked Wednesday about the possibility of her visit, Biden said: “I think that the military thinks it’s not a good idea right now, but I don’t know what the status of it is.”
Biden sidestepped when asked whether he planned to discuss the removal of punitive tariffs slapped on Chinese imports by his predecessor Donald Trump four years ago, another front on which the two sides have clashed.
Asked what he would tell his Chinese counterpart about the tariffs, Biden quipped: “I’ll tell him to have a good day.”
Meanwhile, Washington’s frustration over Beijing’s refusal to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a conflagration that has driven up food and energy prices worldwide, has prompted the Biden administration to double down on support for the Eastern European country with deliveries of military hardware and other aid.
US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said last month that the US was standing firm against Russia to dissuade “would-be aggressors” like China from taking similar actions.
The Biden administration has favoured proactive diplomacy in Asia to “change the strategic environment” around China, as US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a policy speech in May, rather than try to force a change in Beijing’s policies.
This has included the launch of an Indo-Pacific Economic Framework at the end of Biden’s first visit to East Asia, the establishment of the Aukus alliance with Britain and Australia, and his exchanges with Association of Southeast Asian Nations leaders in a special summit.
Additional reporting by Owen Churchill
This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP’s Facebook and Twitter pages. Copyright © 2022 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.
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