Biden Meets China’s Xi to Build ‘Personal Relationship’
BIDEN CHINA
Nelson Ching/Bloomberg
China's vice president Xi Jinping, right, attends a welcoming ceremony U.S. vice president Joe Biden, at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China.
China's vice president Xi Jinping, right, attends a welcoming ceremony U.S. vice president Joe Biden, at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China. Photographer: Nelson Ching/Bloomberg
U.S. Vice President Joe Biden stressed the importance of the U.S. relations with China yesterday during a meeting in Beijing with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, as Xi emphasized the two governments’ common interests.
“There’s no more important relationship that we need to establish on the part of the United States than the close relationship with China,” Biden told Xi prior to a closed-door meeting at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People. Biden added that he hoped the “personal relationship” he has with Xi, who is in line to lead China over the next decade, “will continue to grow as well.”
In his remarks, Xi cited the two countries’ “common responsibilities” and said it was “the joint desire of China and the United States and elsewhere in the world to see a close cooperation between China and the United States.”
Talks held later in private were sweeping in scope, candid, direct and honest, administration officials who spoke on condition of anonymity said. Biden brought up U.S. efforts to rein in its deficit, and asked Xi for details on China’s push to rebalance its economy away from exports, the officials said. Biden told Xi that the U.S.-China relationship will determine the progress of world economic growth, they said.
White House National Security Council Asia director Daniel Russel had earlier said that forging a personal relationship with Xi, set to begin assuming the top posts from President and Communist Party General Secretary Hu Jintao beginning late next year, is important to ensure that the leaders of the world’s two biggest economies can communicate.
The context for the meeting “is that we make a point of sustaining regular and high-level contacts with Chinese leaders as a way to ensure that we’re able to speak directly and speak authoritatively about the entire spectrum of issues that we are working on,” Russel told reporters in Washington on Aug. 15.
In Line
Xi, 58, was elevated to the ruling Politburo Standing Committee in 2007 and assumed the vice presidency in March 2008. He is following a succession trail blazed by Hu, 68, a decade ago. Last year, Xi was appointed as a vice chairman of the Communist Party’s Central Military Commission, which oversees the People’s Liberation Army -- a post Hu held before assuming the commission’s chairmanship in 2004.
In discussions that lasted more than an hour, the two vice presidents also discussed Afghanistan, Pakistan, North Korea and Iran, the administration officials said. Biden, 68, called for a broader and deeper dialogue, including between military and security establishments, they said.
U.S. Politics
Xi asked Biden for details of the politics behind the deal to raise the U.S. government’s debt ceiling, they said.
A day after Standard & Poor’s Aug. 5 downgrade of U.S. debt to AA+ from AAA, China’s Xinhua News Agency issued a warning: “The U.S. government has to come to terms with the painful fact that the good old days when it could just borrow its way out of messes of its own making are finally gone.”
Biden underscored the strength of the U.S. during his meeting with Xi and said America can still lead the global economy, according to the officials. He told Xi that moves to strengthen the yuan and remove barriers to imports would help the U.S. keep its open trade and investment policies with China, the officials said.
Xi said China is determined to increase imports and move to an economy led by consumption. China’s trade surplus surged to $31.5 billion in July as exports rose to a record.
Biden later attended a dinner hosted by Xi at the Great Hall of the People, which lies on the western end of Tiananmen Square and is home to the country’s parliament.
U.S. Trip
Like Hu before him in 2002, Xi is scheduled to make an official visit to the U.S. later this year or early next year. He’s due to assume the leadership of the ruling Communist Party late next year and the presidency in March 2013. If he sticks to the script, he’ll hand the reins to his successor beginning in 2022.
Biden may find during his four days with Xi, which culminates in a trip to a school rebuilt after a 2008 earthquake, he receives few insights into the future course of Chinese policymaking and plenty of praise for Hu.
“Before a presidential election in the U.S., everyone who’s even contemplating running for president spends 100 percent of his time announcing how he would change everything if he was elected,” said Kenneth Lieberthal, who held Russel’s post under President Bill Clinton. “In China, the incentives are exactly the opposite. Your incentives are to do nothing except praise what the current leaders are doing because they’re the ones who decide whether you replace them.”
Powerful Father
Xi is the son of Xi Zhongxun, a former Communist Party boss and governor of southern China’s Guangdong Province. According to the elder Xi’s official biography, he was responsible for making the province a centerpiece for economic opening in 1979, winning the endorsement of paramount leader Deng Xiaoping. The elder Xi died in 2002.
Before taking the vice president’s post, Xi served as Communist Party secretary for Shanghai and prior to that held the same post in Zhejiang, the second-richest province in China in per-capita terms. Zhejiang is home to many of China’s most successful private companies, including Wanxiang Group Co., whose chairman, Lu Guanqiu, met President Barack Obama at the White House in January.
Xi holds a doctorate in law and a chemical engineering degree from Beijing’s Tsinghua University, Hu’s alma mater, according to his official biography. He is married to a popular singer who sang folk songs in the army during the 1980s.
To contact the reporters on this story: Kate Andersen Brower in Beijing at kandersen7@bloomberg.net; Michael Forsythe in Beijing at mforsythe@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Peter Hirschberg at phirschberg@bloomberg.net
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