Biden raises concerns with Chinese president in first official phone call

President Joe Biden speaks about the situation in Myanmar in the South Court Auditorium of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington, DC, on February 10, 2021.

President Joe Biden spoke with Chinese President Xi Jinping by phone Wednesday evening for the first time since taking office, according to the White House.

According to a White House statement, Biden raised his “fundamental concerns” about Beijing’s “coercive and unfair economic practices, crackdown in Hong Kong, human rights abuses in Xinjiang, and increasingly assertive actions in the region, including toward Taiwan.”

The statement said the two leaders also discussed countering the Covid-19 pandemic, and “the shared challenges of global health security, climate change, and preventing weapons proliferation.”

Officials said Biden also planned to express his hopes the two leaders could cooperate on issues such as nuclear nonproliferation and climate change.

The president does not plan at this time to lift tariffs on China that were imposed by the Trump administration, senior administration officials said in advance of the call, and he is unlikely to reduce the U.S. military presence in Asia as former President Donald Trump had threatened to do during his time in office.

The call between the leaders of the world’s two largest economies, coming three weeks after Biden’s inauguration, follows a review of core elements of U.S. policy toward China during the Trump administration and extensive consultation with America’s allies, the officials said. One of them described Biden as now “in a strong position” to have a substantive conversation with Xi.

Officials said the phone call was aimed at signaling a new U.S. strategy that maintains a core tenet of the Trump administration’s policy — intense competition — but employs a dramatically different approach.

“We looked at what the Trump administration did over four years and found merit in the basic proposition of the an intense strategic competition with China and the need for us to engage in that vigorously, systematically across every instrument of our government and every instrument of our power,” one senior administration official said. “But we found deep problems with the way in which the Trump administration went about that competition.”

Officials said one difference in Biden’s approach will be an emphasis on engaging with U.S. allies, both in Europe and in the Asia Pacific. Biden is expected, for instance, to attend international forums for countries in the region, such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and the East Asia Summit, though it’s unclear if his appearance would be virtual given the pandemic. Former President Obama regularly attended the ASEAN summit, for instance, though Trump skipped it after his first year in office.

(Financial Post)