Biden-Xi summit and Korean Peninsula

By Kim Sang-woo

On Wednesday, Nov. 15 at the Filoli Estate in Woodside, 40 kilometers south of San Francisco, U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping met on the sidelines of the APEC summit, overshadowing the summit itself.

President Biden emerged from four hours of talks with President Xi confident that the U.S.-China relationship was improving, announcing agreements on curbing fentanyl production and restoring military communications, while acknowledging that serious differences remain.

Biden said he and Xi had agreed to pick up the phone and talk during periods of disagreement and called the talks “some of the most constructive and productive discussions we’ve had.”

Securing Xi’s promise of Chinese cooperation in stemming the flow of fentanyl to the US, was high on Biden’s to-do list. A senior official said the agreement under which China would go after specific companies that use fentanyl precursors was made on a “trust but verify” basis.

In return, the U.S. government on Thursday removed a Chinese public security forensic institute from a Commerce Department trade sanction list over alleged abuses against Uyghurs, a long-sought diplomatic aim for China.

“This undermines the credibility of our entity list and our moral authority,” said a spokesperson for the Republican-led House of Representatives select committee on China.

The resumption of military dialogues terminated by China following then-U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s 2022 trip to Taiwan is also considered a success.

“China fears hotlines could be used as a potential pretext for a US presence in areas it claims as its own,” said Craig Singleton, a Chinese expert at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington.

Foreign policy issues seldom win incumbent U.S. Presidents elections. But they can certainly lose them elections, or at the very least feature heavily.

And although topics discussed at the summit are critical in the U.S.-China relationship, domestic issues such as the economy, immigration, abortion rights and crime top the agenda in the election year.

Biden’s meeting with Xi will, therefore, affect his domestic support mainly in terms of how it relates to these domestic concerns. Fentanyl is an area where the two definitely overlap.

Whether Biden succeeds in reducing the flow of the drug across the Mexican border into the U.S. will significantly impact domestic perceptions of his engagement with China. If successful, it could also strengthen his position in the debate on how to manage its southern border: Republicans are attacking Biden as being weak on immigration.

At a press conference Biden held immediately after the summit, he said the talks were conducted in “the interest of the American people,” an effort to convince Americans of the necessity of such talks.

On Thursday, Biden and APEC summit leaders posed for pictures. He made time for a separate photo with South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol and Japanese Prime Minister Kishida Fumio, a reflection of closer relations with the two allies.

What did the United States’ Indo-Pacific allies, namely South Korea and Japan think of the summit?

Few countries have as much directly at stake as South Korea and Japan, which are U.S. treaty allies dependent on Washington for their security, but closely linked economically with China, and both countries are located in the vicinity.

Taiwan which faces an existential threat from China, is even more invested in U.S.-China relations. Beijing considers Taiwan to be an “inalienable part of China” and reserves the right to achieve full “reunification” even by force if necessary. With China’s military maneuvers around Taiwan becoming ever more provocative, the threat of forcible annexation looms large and the question of how the United States would respond is the subject of immense debate.

South Korea, Japan, Taiwan and the US have adopted the “free and open Indo-Pacific” and “rules-based international order,” meaning “let’s counter China's bad behavior.” They have embraced, at times reluctantly, U.S.-led economic measures designed to target China’s access to cutting-edge technology and “de-risk” by reconfiguring trade ties away from China wherever possible.

They have also joined the U.S. in efforts to counter China militarily. South Korea and Japan have been deepening both bilateral and trilateral military cooperation with the United States. And Taiwan's arms sales have been increased by Washington, as well as more military cooperation.

The perceptions of the U.S. allies of the Biden-Xi summit, for the most part, are positive. Almost every country in the world has deep concerns about U.S.-China tensions reaching a point of no return, and potentially sparking a great power conflict. While their alliance and quasi-alliance relationships with the U.S. mean they have already chosen sides, none of these countries wants to be forced to completely decouple from China.

South Korea’s Yoon administration has taken a noticeably hard line on China. Yoon has been particularly intent on improving relations with both the United States and Japan, and the three countries cemented their trilateral partnership with the Camp David Summit earlier this year.

From both the U.S. and Chinese readouts, the Korean Peninsula didn’t feature heavily in the Biden-Xi summit, despite worrying new developments in North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs over the past year, and recently, the growing military ties with Russia.

Yoon may be hoping that the thaw in U.S.-China relations will give him an opportunity to improve South Korea-China ties. In particular, Seoul is keen to resume the annual trilateral summit between the leaders of China, Japan, and South Korea as it is the latter's turn to host the event.

Unfortunately, the much-anticipated summit between Yoon and Xi did not take place, and instead of a trilateral summit between the U.S., Japan and South Korea, a brief photo opportunity took its place. This raises some serious questions in regard to our diplomacy which needs to be answered.

Kim Sang-woo (swkim54@hotmail.com), a former lawmaker, is chairman of the East Asia Cultural Project and a member of the board of directors at the Kim Dae-jung Peace Foundation.