Biden and Xi Jinping to speak by phone in effort to improve U.S.-China ties

HONG KONG — U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping will speak by phone “in the coming weeks,” the White House said Wednesday, as part of an effort to improve relations between the two superpowers.

The announcement came as national security adviser Jake Sullivan wrapped up two days of talks in Beijing with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi.

The White House said the two sides had held “candid, substantive and constructive” talks on a range of bilateral, regional and global issues.

“Both sides welcomed ongoing efforts to maintain open lines of communication, including planning for a leader-level call in the coming weeks,” it said in a readout of the Sullivan-Wang meeting.

A readout from the Chinese Foreign Ministry said the two sides “discussed a new round of interaction between the two heads of state in the near future.”

Both sides said there are also plans for a call between their respective military theater commanders. Xi agreed to resume military-to-military communications last year after cutting them off in 2022 in response to a visit to Taiwan by Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the U.S. House speaker at the time.

On Thursday, Sullivan met with Gen. Zhang Youxia, vice chairman of China’s Central Military Commission. The meeting marked the highest-level public engagement the Biden administration has had with the Chinese military and was the first time a U.S. official had met with a commission vice chair since Defense Secretary Jim Mattis in 2018.

Ties between the world’s two largest economies are strained by a number of issues, including tech and trade restrictions, Beijing’s alleged support for Russia’s war in Ukraine, tensions in the South China Sea and the status of Taiwan, a self-governing island that Beijing claims as its territory. Both sides appeared to stand firm on those issues in readouts of the meeting.

The Biden administration has sought to “responsibly manage” competition with China while also seeking areas for cooperation such as climate change and the international flow of illicit drugs. But relations reached their lowest point in decades early last year after the appearance of a Chinese spy balloon over North America that was shot down by the U.S. military.

In an attempt to stabilize what is generally considered the most important bilateral relationship in the world, Sullivan and Wang have held a series of backchannel meetings since last year. They met in Vienna in May 2023, Malta in September 2023 and Bangkok in January 2024. Wang also visited Washington in October 2023 to meet with Biden.

But this was Sullivan’s first trip to China as national security adviser, and the first by a national security adviser since Susan Rice near the end of the Obama administration in 2016. Rice was also the last national security adviser to meet with a vice chairman of the Central Military Commission.

“We are working to ensure that competition does not veer into conflict, and that we find ways to work together where our interests align,” Sullivan said after arriving in Beijing on Tuesday.

Biden and Xi have spoken only once by phone since November, when they held four hours of talks in California on the sidelines of a summit of Asia-Pacific leaders. With direct contact between them being so rare, the two leaders have few opportunities left to interact one-on-one before Biden leaves the White House early next year.

During their talks in November, Biden and Xi reached agreements in several areas including counternarcotics, military-to-military communications, and artificial intelligence safety and risk. The White House said Sullivan and Wang discussed next steps for implementing those agreements.

China said Wednesday that a second round of U.S.-China talks on artificial intelligence was being planned.

They also discussed cooperation in other areas such as the repatriation of undocumented migrants and climate change. China and the U.S. are the world’s two biggest greenhouse gas emitters.

Without specifying a date, the White House readout mentioned an upcoming trip to China by John Podesta, who recently succeeded John Kerry as the U.S. climate envoy.