The meeting between Xi Jinping and Joe Biden is supposed to take place on November 15, with the two world leaders expected to broach issues such as restoring military-to-military communications between Washington and Beijing, with the White House claiming that it is going to be a “tough conversation.”
Scholar, educator and journalist KJ Noh who focuses on Asia-Pacific affairs, expressed his skepticism about the prospects of this Biden-Xi meeting.
He also highlighted that the Chinese side insisted that the US should abide by the “five agreements of Bali.”
“That is no system change, no Cold War against China, no hot war against China, no economic war against China, no Taiwan provocations. And the US is crossing red lines on four of these five agreements,” the journalist told Sputnik.
Commenting on the recent meeting between US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng, Noh argued that the United States is unlikely to “change its tone” in the conversation with China.
“I've said this many times: the US is essentially playing ‘good cop, bad cop.’ Remember it put on these chips sanctions on China, which are designed to destroy China's high tech economy,” he said, noting how the NYT “referred to it as an act of war, designed not only to freeze China's technological development in place, but to actually make it devolve.”
“So inside this kind of context, the Chinese have said ‘if we are going to meet we need to have some serious good faith efforts on your part.’ And instead, the US is doing this kind of diplomatic offensive. Nice words. And this is just good cop, bad cop. Jekyll and Hyde,” Noh argued.
Relations between Beijing and Washington have been steadily deteriorating since Biden’s predecessor Donald Trump initiated a trade war against China.
Over the past few years, the United States has sought to target Chinese tech companies with economic sanctions and ramp up its military presence in the Asia Pacific region, not to mention supplying large quantities of weaponry to the island of Taiwan.
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