Everyone knows that China and the United States don’t get along. The two countries are built on different ideologies, both believing that their way is right. This close-minded worldview makes it difficult for the two countries to see eye to eye with some people even describing the tension as a second Cold War.
The United States’ current administration launched a plan to defuse that tension starting with a meeting between the United States president, Joe Biden, and the President of the People’s Republic of China, Xi Jinping. The meeting took place Monday, November 14 in Nusa Dua, Indonesia, neutral ground.
The two leaders touched on many different subjects during their three-hour discussion. No conclusions were reached, but Yu Jie, a senior research fellow on China, called the meeting “a baby step” and said that the discussion didn’t “resolve any substantial grievances both sides have had against each other, but only slowed the deterioration of the relations.”
Though nothing was truly accomplished, slowing the collapse of relations was extremely important as the United States and China have the second and fourth largest strongholds of nuclear warheads as well as the first and third strongest military respectively.
If the two countries were to ever go to war, it would spell death for most of the world.
Even though the two countries didn’t get along, neither leader tiptoed around any of the issues at hand, even ones that caused extreme tension, like China’s threat against Taiwan or the U.S.’s dramatic export bans on important semiconductor technology. Biden even said that he and Zi were “very blunt with one another” with the Chinese president calling the meeting “in-depth, candid and constructive.”
So what issues on the table merited a three hour discussion?
Aside from the two issues mentioned above, the leaders also discussed climate talks coming to the agreement to resume climate talks that had been frozen after Nancy Pelosi, the US House Speaker visited Taiwan last August. While the trip might not seem significant to most, China claims Taiwan as its own, causing Pelosi’s visit to be viewed as intervention on the part of the US.
The countries also discussed the situation in the Ukraine with the US pushing China to take a clearer stand against Russia’s war in the Ukraine, despite the Asain country signing a partnership with Moscow in February. Several political analysts say that China was taken by surprise when Russia invaded Ukraine earlier this year and has since called for a peaceful negotiated end to the war.
Despite leading two of the strongest nuclear countries, Zi and Biden both agreed “that a nuclear war should never be fought and can never be won and underscored their opposition to the use or threat of use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine” according to the White House’s statement. Interestingly, the Chinese readout included nothing about nuclear weapons.
Another country talked about during the meeting was North Korea, a long standing security issue to China and the surrounding region. The country has recently been moving in an ambitious direction when it comes to weapons, and Biden warned Xi that if China was unable to rein the country in, the US would find the necessity to beef up its presence in the region. Such a move would be read by China as a threat to its own security, something the Asian country wants to avoid.
Though not discussed in the meeting itself, China’s foreign minister Wang Yi came out last year with three core demands, or bottom lines, that his country wanted the US to agree to in order to improve relations. The country didn’t want the US to get in the way of its development, they wanted the US to respect its claims over places like Taiwan, and they also wanted the US to respect its Communist Party Rule.
From China’s perspective, the US has ignored all three of these demands as they upped ties with Taiwan and Congress considers arming the island with American weaponry.
The situation isn’t black and white. The United States wants to protect its interests in Taiwan with a great deal of important exports coming from the island. On the other hand, China has declared the island to be part of the Chinese mainland.
No conclusion has been reached about this issue, and it may take a while for one to come. In fact, many of the issues talked about during the meeting could take years to resolve. International Politics is complicated, and it’s almost always within a gray area.
There is good news. This meeting is a step in the right direction, no matter how small. Smoothing over relations between the US and China may just be what keeps the world out of another World War. One step is better than none.
With all that being said, don’t stop praying. God is working behind the scenes moving everything according to his plan.
Right now, we can only see the twisted, messy strands of the back of the tapestry. Some day, maybe even during our lives, we’ll see the clean picture of what God is doing with our world. We don’t see it now. But it’s still there, hidden beneath the politics and all the fancy words.
https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/countries-with-the-most-nuclear-weapons.html
https://www.npr.org/2022/11/14/1136459450/biden-xi-meeting
https://www.voanews.com/a/biden-meets-with-china-s-xi-discusses-taiwan-trade-rights/6833891.html