President Joe Biden’s meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Monday, which took place in the shadow of the G-20 economic conference in Indonesia, revealed troubling aspects of a coming new world order Chinese style, as well as just how wrongheaded and weak Biden is when it comes to understanding the communist Chinese threat.
The first sign of trouble came when the two presidents met face to face at the summit.
Biden was spotted smiling and holding out his hand as he approached nervously toward his Chinese colleague, who seemed glum and disdainful of the American. The incident may be compared to a young subordinate who just spotted his boss and ran to greet him, while the boss scowled at the young upstart.
In comparison, Biden arrived at the Xi meeting weakened by the prospect of losing his party’s majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, as well as a slew of troubling domestic issues, including a deeply divided citizenry and an arguably declining military.
Aside from the optics of the summit, what Biden said at the post-meeting press conference on Monday evening demonstrates his priorities as well as his failure to truly understand the Chinese leadership’s intentions.
Biden claimed his conversations with President Xi were “open and candid,” and that he made the dictator aware of his “intentions and priorities.”
Furthermore, he stated that he told Xi that he “would defend American values, human rights, and compete vigorously,” and that America’s China policy has not changed regarding Taiwan’s status.
Biden failed to mention whether he pressed the Chinese leader on important issues such as the regime’s maligned economic behaviors like its failure to abide by trade agreements, its military aggression in the South China Sea, the supply of precursors used to make fentanyl which annually kills tens of thousands of Americans, the origins of COVID, the rampant stealing of our intellectual property, and whether it will dial back on its well-documented human rights violations.
The president allowed only four questions after his remarks at the press briefing. He was asked whether a Cold War with China is avoidable. “There need not be a new cold war” with China, said Biden. Rather, we are in “competition” with China. That response ignores the contrary history of “unrestricted warfare” China is waging against the West using all Chinese instruments of power such as economic, military, ideological, geopolitical and technological.
On the issue of Taiwan, which Beijing considers a breakaway province, Biden said he does not anticipate “any imminent attempt on the part of China to invade Taiwan,” even though two weeks ago President Xi vowed to “reunify” the mainland with Taiwan and he would “never promise to renounce the use of force.”
Biden said he “made it clear” to President Xi that our Taiwan policy “has not changed at all.” Yet, on multiple occasions over the past two years, the president confused that policy by promising to defend Taiwan against any communist assault. Yet, Biden insisted that Xi “understood exactly what I was saying.”
Perhaps most distressing is the president’s promise to set up more meetings with Chinese officials to discuss our differences. He took the same approach a year ago in June with Russia’s Vladimir Putin and that didn’t end so well, ask the Ukrainians.
