China’s President Xi Jinping attends a session in the course of the G20 Summit on the Indonesian resort island of Bali on November 16, 2022.
Willy Kurniawan | Afp | Getty Images
BEIJING — A month after consolidating power at home, Chinese President Xi Jinping has stepped out onto the world stage to strengthen relations with the U.S. and other countries.
In all, Xi has met with greater than 25 heads of state — including U.S. President Joe Biden — since Oct. 31, in keeping with a CNBC count of releases on the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s English-language website. Earlier in October, Xi oversaw a leadership reshuffle of the ruling Chinese Communist Party that packed top positions together with his loyalists and paved the best way for him to achieve an unprecedented third term as president.
Most recently, Xi hosted President of the European Council Charles Michel in Beijing on Thursday. That followed German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s visit in early November, the primary Western leader to accomplish that because the pandemic.
“This yr we see [Xi] coming out ever since his [September] SCO trip, coming out more and fascinating more with the international community,” said Michael Cunningham, research fellow, China, at The Heritage Foundation’s Asian Studies Center. “That shall be a challenge for the U.S.”
Cunningham said U.S. efforts to construct overseas coalitions have been helped by Xi’s absence from the international stage for much of the last three years.
The meetings come after the Russia-Ukraine war and Covid restrictions on travel have pushed Beijing and the West apart. Tensions over Taiwan this summer further strained U.S.-China relations.
“Xi is restoring his pre-pandemic level of diplomacy through bilateral meetings with many state leaders attending the G20 summit in Bali,” Eurasia Group analysts said in a Nov. 18 report. “He met with leaders of advanced industrial democracies for the primary time because the pandemic began and amid fraught relations between China and the West. Most of Xi’s meetings fueled a positive outlook for stabilizing relations.”
Xi finally met Biden in-person for the primary time as U.S. president on Nov. 14, signaling a pause on this yr’s downward spiral of relations between the world’s two largest economies. The week following, the countries’ military leaders met for the primary time since U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s controversial Taiwan visit in August.
The high-stakes Xi-Biden meeting signaled to some in China that relations with the U.S. were aligning more with vague terminology that Beijing often uses — similar to “mutual respect” and “win-win cooperation.”
“For China, the wording carries some token symbolism, that’s equality,” said Shen Yamei, deputy director and associate research fellow at state-backed think tank China Institute of International Studies’ department for American studies. “We want to handle our relationships on equal footing, by respecting one another and win-win cooperation, slightly than, because the U.S. said, the U.S. is coping with others from a position of strength. That is not equal.”
Shen said China and the U.S. can work together more easily on problems with climate change, public health and macroeconomic coordination. She said “it can be a bit of bit difficult on issues more concerned with traditional security issues, like our understanding of the Ukraine crisis and the approach to work [it] out.”
“The essential thing is we [keep] in mind the responsibility of a serious country to the world by cooperating with one another,” she said.
Creating ‘positive conditions’ for China
The Biden administration has called China a competitor, while strengthening U.S. ties with other countries, especially within the Indo-Pacific.
Heads of Japan, South Korea, Australia, Indonesia and Italy met with each Xi and Biden within the last several weeks, based on government announcements.
“Right away the political environment in China is different,” Cunningham said. Xi “is attempting to get relationships back on the appropriate track in order that the conditions are positive for China.”
“The best way China sees it, the appropriate track and positive conditions is where the world’s strongest countries, the U.S., Western Europe, a few of the East Asian countries, usually are not actively opposing China’s rise as a world power,” he said. “That was the track we were on largely before 2018 when U.S.-China trade tensions really boiled over.”
In his speech on the Chinese Communist Party congress in October, Xi said the Party has “safeguarded China’s dignity” within the face of international changes and warned of “dangerous storms” ahead.
Just before that political meeting, Xi took his first trip outside the country because the pandemic, to Uzbekistan for a gathering of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, an Eurasian intergovernmental group. While there he met with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, amongst other country heads.
