Why Xi Jinping may again refuse contacts with Biden (this time – at the APEC summit on 11 November in San Francisco) and how this could be a step towards conflict in Taiwan?
Judging by the latest comment by Wang Yi, the head of Chinese foreign policy, China’s top leadership is ready to accept the decision to visit San Francisco if the Americans “realise their responsibilities as hosts, show due openness, fairness, tolerance and responsibility, and create better conditions for the smooth conduct of the meeting”.
In other words, it is a question of the US fulfilling obviously impossible conditions and refusing to fulfil those conditions for the meeting that were declared to the Chinese side in advance. This is just the surface of a deeper conflict between the new and old superpowers.
Judging from the last meeting between Xi Jinping and Biden in Bali in 2022, China has set the US the old impossible condition of recognising China as the second, equal superpower to the US in peace talks. Renouncing containment of China – what does this mean? What practical steps should the U.S. take for a “peaceful détente” with China?
For example, give up its technological blockade. What would this mean for any U.S. leader in the face of a total anti-China consensus in U.S. society? Or giving up support for pro-American forces in Taiwan – can the current American leadership make such concessions? That would be even more difficult.
That’s right, any U.S. president who makes a deal with China would be a traitor, a weakling. Such a deal might have been possible under some new conventional Nixon, but it is impossible under Biden, or even under Trump or even more anti-China personalities at the helm of the country.
Therefore, a clash between the US and China is inevitable.
San Francisco will become another venue for the Democratic Party to negotiate with its Komsomol clone in China: the event may be attended by Chinese Vice-Chairman Han Zheng, Li Qiang or, what’s worse, the special representative on climate. But most likely Han Zheng. He failed to beat Xi in Shanghai in 2007, so maybe he will succeed here.
The Biden administration, nodding and agreeing with China in words, is loading shells and pointing guns at the target: a trip to Vietnam, the India-EU transport corridor, new chip restrictions, additional arms pumping into Taiwan. The Chinese are watching this and of course preparing to retaliate.
Of course, it is not burning out microchip production facilities with napalm, not butchering the coast and not “saving Private Wang” – just blockade of the island and occupation of a couple of islands in the South China Sea. The US is already preparing for such a scenario – not without setbacks, but preparing. Perhaps China and the US will spend the whole year 2024 in such a state, and Biden will become the first US president during whose administration the US was not visited by a Chinese leader.
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