United States President Joe Biden and President Xi Jinping of China will meet on Saturday in what is expected to be their last face-to-face meeting during Biden’s term as Beijing braces for a Donald Trump presidency in Washington.
The two leaders are attending a two-day heads of state meeting of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation group in Lima, Peru, that began on Friday. Saturday’s meeting will be the third time the two will meet in person since Biden took office.
Relations between China and the US, the world’s most important superpowers, had nosedived during Trump’s first term as president, when he started a trade war with Beijing, using punishing tariff rates.
Yet ties became even rockier in the past four years of the Biden administration, with sore points ranging from trade wars to TikTok. In 2023, Mexico overtook China as the US’s biggest trade partner for the first time in 20 years as economic ties deteriorated.
Still, Biden has sought to maintain a steady relationship with Beijing. US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters ahead of the Lima meeting that Xi and Biden would discuss the transition to a Trump White House and the need for level-headedness on both sides in that period.
In his election campaign this year, Trump threatened to slap 60 percent blanket tariffs on all Chinese imports to the US.
Here’s a picture of how the US-China relations soured under Biden – and what to expect under Trump 2.0:
Trump, in his first run as government, kickstarted a trade war with China after his administration blamed Beijing for ‘unfair’ trade practices that it said contributed to a large trade deficit in China’s favour. Those practices, the US maintains, include forced labour, intellectual property theft and unfairly low pricing that hurts US producers. China has long denied these allegations.
From January 2018, the Trump administration imposed higher tariffs on Chinese imports at rates of between 10 to 25 percent under Section 301 of the Trade Act. Beijing accused Washington of ‘nationalist protectionism’ and retaliated with higher tariffs on US imports.
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