Chinese spy agency suggests that a Biden-Xi meeting hinges on ‘sincerity’

BEIJING - China’s top security agency has hinted that any meeting between President Xi Jinping and US President Joe Biden in San Francisco later in 2023 will depend on the United States “showing enough sincerity”.

Mr Biden on Sunday

expressed disappointment that Mr Xi was not attending an upcoming summit

of Group of 20 (G-20) leaders in India, but added that he was going to “get to see him”.

Mr Biden did not elaborate, but the next likely opportunity for him to hold talks with Mr Xi, as the two countries seek to stabilise troubled relations, is an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) summit in San Francisco in November.

“To truly realise ‘from Bali to San Francisco’, the United States needs to show enough sincerity”, the Ministry of State Security said in a post on Monday on its WeChat social media page.

It was referring to the

last meeting between Mr Biden and Mr Xi, on the sidelines of a G-20 summit

on Indonesia’s resort island of Bali in November 2022. It did not mention the Apec summit in its post.

It is unclear if the ministry, which is China’s main intelligence agency, is privy to, or has influence over, Mr Xi’s considerations on diplomatic engagements.

Premier Li Qiang will lead a delegation to a G-20 summit in New Delhi

this weekend, the Chinese government has announced, all but confirming that Mr Xi would not attend.

The ministry in its post said Mr Biden’s administration had adopted a dual-natured strategy towards Beijing, inviting competition with China but also wanting to control the competition.

It said that while US officials who visited China recently said there was no intention to curb China’s development or “decouple”, the US still approved arms sales and provided military financing to Taiwan, and raised issues about Tibet and the South China Sea as well as openly criticised the Chinese economy.

“China will never let its guard down because of a few ‘nice words’ from the United States… The various obstacles, containment and suppression by the United States will only make China more courageous and self-reliant,” it added.

US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, who visited China last week,

said the US did not want to decouple from China but she also said US companies had complained to her that China has become “uninvestable”, pointing to fines, raids and other actions that have made it risky to do business in the world’s second-largest economy. China repeated calls for the US to take more “practical and beneficial actions” to maintain China-US ties after the “uninvestable” comment was reported. REUTERS