President of the United States Joe Biden is “looking forward” to meeting Chinese President Xi Jinping in San Francisco later this month, the White House has said. The two leaders will meet on the sidelines of the APEC Leadership Summit, giving America an opportunity to “move forward with China”.
“The president is looking forward to it. And that, I think should answer your question,” said White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre to reporters on Tuesday at her daily news conference, when asked about reports of a Biden-Xi meeting in San Francisco.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has also been invited for the APEC Leadership summit by President Biden. However, India is most likely to be represented by a Cabinet-level minister.
“We’ve been talking about it. The president said he’s looking forward to [the] meeting — with President Xi. [We’re] not going to get into details about this meeting that’s going to happen in November. It’s going to be in San Francisco. It’s going to be a constructive meeting,” said Jean-Pierre.
She said that the policy of the Biden Administration as to how to move forward with China had not changed. “This is intense competition, right, that we have said that we want to move forward with China. We understand that and intense competition means intense diplomacy. That’s what you’re going to see. That’s what the president is going to be doing and having a tough conversation, but important conversation,” she said.
The White House press secretary added, “We’ve seen about three secretaries go to China and have these diplomatic conversations. We saw Secretary Blinken, we saw National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan having important conversations, diplomatic conversations with their counterparts in China. This is an important relationship. Again, this is about competition. That’s what we want to see with China.”