Power shifts at the Biden-Xi summit

Perhaps the most important achievement of the summit between Xi Jinping and Joe Biden was that it was held at all. Expectations were set low and were duly met – assuming the modest agreements are carried through. There was little progress on issues that have pushed relations to the lowest point in four decades, and Xi still remains a ‘dictator’ in the eyes of the American president. Asked if he still held that view at the end of a carefully choreographed solo news conference, at which only four questions were allowed, Biden said, ‘Look, he is. He’s a dictator in the sense that he runs a country that’s a communist country and is based on a form of government that is totally different than ours,’ That is of course a truism, but Beijing bristled last time Biden used the word, and how the Chinese Communist Party barks back will be a measure of whether this summit really has made any fundamental difference.

The four-hour summit, held at the historic Filoli estate on the eastern slope of the Santa Cruz mountains, around 45 km south of San Francisco, was the first meeting between the two men for a year, and was held on the sidelines of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meeting in that city.