Xi Jinping makes ‘siren call’ in US amid sinking stock in China
Xi Jinping during his visit to San Francisco
By Manish Anand
New Delhi, November 18: Chinese President Xi Jinping in his four-hour long summit with US President Joe Biden argued passionately to dissuade Washington from pursuing a containment strategy that had been launched by Donald Trump with a slew of tariffs. Xi’s slogging in San Francisco to impress upon his American audiences to forget memories of his wining with Russian President Vladimir Putin for shared fortunes in the next century and also pulling strings in Tehran are seen by commentators to have been unimpressive.
Biden did not roll out the red-carpet for Xi. There was no state dinner for the Chinese ruler. The US and China also didn’t come out with a joint statement after the summit. Biden called Xi a dictator in a solo presser after the summit.
“China is both a super-large economy and a super-large market,” Xi told leading leaders of the business groups in the US while attending a dinner in San Francisco, while asserting that he would see that there are far more opportunities for the Americans. “That’s a siren call to the business community to re-enter a period of closer economic partnership,” Politico quoted Rupert Hammond-Chambers, president of the U.S.-Taiwan Business Council whose members include firms that do business in both Taiwan and China, on Xi’s offering carrots to make “the pie of cooperation bigger”.
But Xi has a humongous challenge on hand, for Politico quoted Siva Yam, president of the Chicago-based U.S.-China Chamber of Commerce, saying: “In the last 18 months, we have been hearing a lot of [small and medium-sized enterprises] are looking for other opportunities, some are even closing their factories — for them to come back to China is going to be a big challenge.”
Former diplomat Yogesh Gupta sought to give the economic context to Xi’s hard arguments against the US bid to de-couple in an article in The Tribune, saying: “As per a study, China’s GDP, which was about 75 per cent of the US in 2021, declined to about 64 per cent in the third quarter of 2023 due to mounting local government debt, a housing bubble, declining foreign trade and lesser confidence in its economy”.
He argued that while China is aware that the US wouldn’t change its position on any of the critical issues between them, Beijing hopes that after this meeting, Washington may delay the imposition of more sanctions on the export of technologies…”
While China after Xi took the third term early this year is making bids for self-reliance in critical technologies, Yukon Huang wrote for Carnegie Endowment saying that Beijing is adjusting to Washington’s punitive measures with domestic manufacturing capacity for high-tech products”. However, Xi’s outreach may have limited outcome as he noted “Biden cannot afford to appear conciliatory, given the anti-China sentiments of both Republicans and Democrats” as the US continues to support the Indo-Pacific agenda and “aspects of which Beijing views as a containment strategy”.
Incidentally, Yukon Huang and Genevieve Solsberg in a research paper on the impact of the punitive actions by the US against China unveiled by the Trump administration claimed that the bilateral economic relations are on downhill journey but the aim to weaken Beijing economically is not happening. “China may be exporting less directly to the United States, but it is now doing so indirectly. Aside from Vietnam and Mexico, the next five economies with the largest increases in U.S. manufacturing exports added another $200 billion. These were Canada, South Korea, Taiwan, India, and Ireland,” they added in a paper for CLM.
Yet, the commentators underline that Xi’s warming up to the US has an air of urgency on the back of sinking economy back home, vanishing foreign direct investment, floundering property market which was the mainstay of high growth, extremely high unemployment rate among the youth.
Chinese ambassador in the US Xie Feng quoted the poetic words of Xi to the American business leaders: “The passage of time is like a surging river— much is washed away, but the most valuable stays. No matter how the global landscape evolves, the historical trend of peaceful coexistence between China and the US will not change. The ultimate wish of our two peoples for exchanges and cooperation will not change. The expectations of the whole world for a steadily growing China-US relationship will not change.”
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