US President Joe Biden speaks virtually with Chinese leader Xi Jinping from the White House in Washington.
Credit: Reuters File Photo
US President Joe Biden would meet his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the APEC Leadership Summit in San Francisco later this month, the White House has confirmed.
"The president is looking forward to it. And that, I think should answer your question,” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters on Tuesday at her daily news conference when asked about reports of a Biden-Xi meeting in San Francisco.
India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi has also been invited for the APEC Leadership summit by President Biden. 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 meeting -- to meeting with President Xi. And -- and so, 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,” Jean-Pierre said.
“Look, what I'm saying is that we're aiming to have a constructive conversation, meeting between the leaders in San Francisco in November. So that's what I'm saying. That's what's going to happen in November. We're going to have constructive conversation in San Francisco,” she said.
She said that the policy of the Biden Administration as to how to move forward with China hasn't 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.
“I'm not going to get into any kind of, you know, decisions made on this. This is going to be about the diplomatic conversations. 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,” Jean-Pierre said, adding that “this is going to be an important diplomatic conversation that they are going to have”.