Biden and Xi to speak after rare U.S. security advisor trip to China

BEIJING — U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping are set to speak over the phone in “coming weeks,” the White House said Wednesday.

The announcement came amid U.S. national security advisor Jake Sullivan’s trip to Beijing this week to meet with Wang Yi, China’s top diplomat.

Both sides said their military leaders would also hold a call in the near future.

Chin added that plans for the second round of U.S.-China talks on artificial intelligence are underway. The White House noted John Podesta, senior advisor to the president for international climate policy, would soon travel to China, without specifying a date.

In official readouts of Sullivan’s trip, the two nations maintained their positions on tech restrictions, Taiwan, the South China Sea and Ukraine.

Biden is not running for reelection in November after this summer, ceding the nomination to his vice president, Kamala Harris. The White House statement did not name the presidents, instead it noted plans for a “leader-level call.”

The Chinese side’s statement used its typical language of “two heads of state,” and said both sides were discussing “a new round of interaction,” according to a CNBC translation of the Chinese.

Biden and Xi held a nearly two-hour phone call in early April, after the two leaders had met in November 2023 on the sidelines of a summit in Woodside, California.

High-level communication between the world’s two largest economies hasn’t been easy in recent years amid heightened tensions and Covid-19 restrictions.

Then-U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan in August 2022 and a high-profile “balloon incident” in February 2023 had further strained their relationship, suspending some planned talks.

Sullivan arrived in Beijing Tuesday, wrapped up two days of meetings with Wang on Wednesday and is set to depart Thursday. This is his first trip to China as national security advisor, despite multiple meetings with Wang in recent years.

The last official trip to China by a U.S. president’s national security advisor was in 2016, when Susan Rice traveled to Beijing under the Obama administration.

While the outcome of November’s presidential election remains unclear, being tough on Beijing is a rare issue that both U.S. political parties agree on.

Harris’ current national security advisor, Phil Gordon, said in May at a Council on Foreign Relations event that the “China challenge” is much greater than Taiwan, and requires ensuring that Beijing “doesn’t have the advanced technology, intelligence and military capabilities that can challenge us.”