UPDATED 12:42 P.M.
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) -U.S. President Joe Biden meets Chinese leader Xi Jinping for the first time in a year on Wednesday for talks that may ease friction between the two superpowers over military conflicts, drug-trafficking and artificial intelligence.
But deep progress on the vast differences separating them may have to wait for another day.
Officials on both sides of the Pacific have set expectations low as Biden and Xi are set to discuss Taiwan, the South China Sea, the Israel-Hamas war, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, North Korea and human rights – areas where the leaders have been unable to resolve long-standing disagreements.
Biden and Xi arrived in San Francisco on Tuesday, where they were set to meet on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit.
Leaders from the 21-country group – and hundreds of CEOs in San Francisco to court them – meet amid Chinese economic weakness, Beijing’s territorial feuds with neighbors, and a Middle East conflict that is dividing the United States from allies.
Efforts to carefully choreograph Xi’s visit may be upended in San Francisco despite efforts to drive homeless people from the streets. The route from the airport to the conference site was lined with demonstrators for and against China’s ruling Communist Party, an unusual sight for Xi, who last visited the United States in 2017.
Biden has sought direct diplomacy with Xi, betting that a personal relationship he has cultivated for a dozen years with the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao Zedong might salvage ties that are increasingly turning hostile.
Chong Ja Ian, a political science professor at the National University of Singapore, said the two sides are engaged in what Mao referred to during the Chinese civil war as “talk and fight, fight and talk”.
“That is, to talk while building up forces,” Chong said.
Xi and Biden are expected to meet far from the conference location at Filoli Estate, miles outside of San Francisco and carefully chosen for its security, serenity and remoteness.
The White House hopes the meeting could set the stage for further talks between the world’s biggest economies.
“We’re all expecting that this will be a productive discussion today, and hopefully, a precursor to much more communication and dialogue between our two teams going forward,” White House spokesperson John Kirby told reporters ahead of the meeting.
IRAN, ELECTION INTERFERENCE, FENTANYL
During the meeting, Biden is expected to press Xi to use China’s influence to urge Iran to avoid provocative action or encouraging its proxies to enter the fray in what, moves that could spread the Israel-Hamas conflict across the Middle East.
He is also expected to raise alleged Chinese operations to influence foreign elections, the status of U.S. citizens that Washington believes are wrongly detained in China and human rights, including what Washington says is an ongoing genocide against Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in China’s Xinjiang region.
“I think you can fully expect that the president will raise our concerns over human rights in China to include the issue of the Uyghurs,” Kirby said.
U.S. officials expected concrete steps to restore staff-level conversations between the two countries on issues from military-to-military communications to reducing the flow of fentanyl, managing the growth of artificial intelligence technologies, and managing trade and climate.
Many of the chemicals used to make fentanyl come from China, U.S. officials say.
Before the meeting, both countries backed a new renewable energy target and said they would work to reduce methane and plastic pollution, a renewal of climate cooperate suspended after former U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan in 2022.
Biden, 80, presides over an economy that has outperformed expectations and most rich nations after the COVID-19 pandemic. He is seeking a second term in office.
He has corralled the nation’s traditional allies from Europe to Asia to confront Russia in Ukraine, although some have differences over the Israel-Hamas conflict.
Xi, a decade Biden’s junior, has tightened control over policy, state leaders, the media and military and changing the constitution. But economic challenges have thrown the country off its three-decade growth trajectory.
Government officials across the region expect Beijing to test Washington in coming weeks, taking advantage of the United States’ perceived shift in focus on Ukraine and Israel as it pursues its own ambitions in the Indo-Pacific.
Biden is expected to tell Xi that U.S. commitments in the Indo-Pacific are unchanged. China has worried its neighbors in recent years with steps in the Taiwan Strait, South China Sea and East China Sea, areas of international dispute.
(Reporting by Trevor Hunnicutt; Additional reporting by Steve Holland, Michael Martina, Martin Pollard and Jeff Mason; Editing by Heather Timmons, Angus MacSwan, Don Durfee and Josie Kao)
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SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Just blocks from where U.S. President Joe Biden and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping will meet other Asia-Pacific leaders this week in San Francisco is a neighborhood where it is commonplace to see people using and selling drugs.
While the leaders are unlikely to see the blunt reality of the U.S. opioid crisis as they attend the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum, it will be a topic of discussion when Biden and Xi meet one-on-one on Wednesday.
The United States wants China’s cooperation to stop an illicit flow of “precursor” chemicals that are used to make fentanyl, which is up to 50 times stronger than heroin and is increasingly mixed with other drugs – often with lethal results.
In the first nine months of this year, 619 people died of an opioid overdose in San Francisco, most related to the synthetic opioids, compared with 647 such deaths in the whole of 2022, according to the city’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.
“It’s out of control,” said Mike Odeh, 36, a salesperson at a liquor store near where APEC leaders will meet.
He said that while the city had been cleaning up the streets ahead of APEC, he normally sees people using fentanyl while walking his son to the park and to school, adding: “You can see it all over. Not this week of course.”
Across the country the rate of drug overdose deaths involving fentanyl more than tripled from 2016 through 2021, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Tens of thousands of people die annually from synthetic opioid overdoses, government statistics show.
U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said on Tuesday that Washington hoped the Biden-Xi summit would result in action to combat the fentanyl trade. A source familiar with plans said the U.S. was ready to remove restrictions on the Institute of Forensic Science, part of China’s Ministry of Public Security.
Washington put the institute on the Commerce Department’s “entity list” in 2020 over alleged abuses toward Uyghurs and other minority groups – effectively barring it from receiving U.S. exports. China has long questioned why the U.S. would expect cooperation on fentanyl while targeting the institute.
CHINA, MEXICO, US STANCES
China’s embassy in Washington declined to comment on the fentanyl issue. Chinese state media has repeatedly said addiction and demand for the drug are U.S. domestic problems.
U.S. officials say that small chemical businesses in China make precursor chemicals that are shipped to Mexico to produce illicit fentanyl, which is often mixed with other illegal drugs, sold as powders and nasal sprays, and increasingly turned into pills that look like legitimate prescription opioids. These are then smuggled into the United States, the officials say.
Last month, the United States imposed sanctions on 28 people and entities involved with the international proliferation of illicit drugs, including a large China-based network.
“We know that this global fentanyl supply chain, which ends with the deaths of Americans, often starts with chemical companies in China,” said U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland.
Advocates have also accused pharmaceutical companies and related businesses of fueling the crisis through downplaying the risks of opioids and lack of regulation. Landmark settlements since 2021 have set compensation at a total of more than $50 billion nationwide.
Biden is also due to meet with Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in San Francisco. Mexican Foreign Minister Alicia Barcena said talks would include how to better control the arrival from Asia of precursors used to make fentanyl.
In San Francisco, state and local officials have tried to clean up drugs from the city’s streets, with limited success. The crisis has drawn sharp criticism from residents in the city, where drug-fueled crime has forced some businesses to leave.
San Francisco’s new district attorney, Brooke Jenkins, has made prosecuting drug dealers a cornerstone of her agenda. The city recently formed a law enforcement task force to investigate opioid-linked deaths and poisonings.
The city’s Mayor London Breed has pushed to prioritize treatment for drug users, talked of police action as a way to solve the problem, and has called on the federal government to boost its drug trafficking enforcement.
“We know San Francisco – and cities across the United States – will benefit from more targeting of the trafficking and production of fentanyl worldwide,” a spokesperson for Breed said in a statement.
(Additional reporting by Michael Martina; Writing by Sayantani Ghosh and Michelle Nichols; Editing by Josie Kao)
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