This blog is now closed. Here is our full article on today’s meeting between Biden and Xi:
Joe Biden has claimed that his summit meeting with Xi Jinping has brought substantial progress, including agreements on limiting narcotics trafficking, restoring militaries lines of communication, and to start talking about the global risks posed by artificial intelligence.
However, it was clear that after more than four hours of talks in a mansion outside San Francisco, the meeting had not brought the US and China any closer on the fate of Taiwan, which Xi reportedly told Biden was “the biggest, most potentially dangerous issue in US-China relations”.
Furthermore, Biden himself risked undoing some of the bridge-building at the summit, the first between the two leaders for a year, with an off-the-cuff response to a reporter’s question at the tail-end of a press conference, in which he confirmed he still looked on Xi as a dictator.
“Look, he is,” the president said. “He’s a dictator in the sense that he’s a guy who runs a country that is a communist country that’s based on a form of government totally different than ours.”
Updated
