Commentary: Xi Jinping and Joe Biden agree to meet as the US and China try to get on the same page

With all eyes on Gaza, a series of meetings in Washington between senior U.S. and Chinese officials late last week was slightly overlooked by the news cycle. Those sessions, however, have the potential to bring President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping into the same room as soon as mid-November, when the U.S. is due to host an economic conference in San Francisco.

The last time Biden and Xi met for in-person talks was during the November 2022 G20 leaders’ summit in Bali, Indonesia. Those discussions were a seminal event, not because of anything the to China, which Chinese officials up and down the Communist Party bureaucracy strongly condemned as a transparent attempt to stifle the Chinese economy and undermine Beijing’s rise as a great power. Several months before that, in August 2022, U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi, then the speaker of the House, decided despite the Biden administration’s objections, prompting the Chinese People’s Liberation Army to retaliate with the largest military drills around the self-ruled island in history.