US and Chinese Presidents Hold First Virtual Summit, Seeking to Build "Guardrails" for Intense Competition

On November 15, 2021, the Chinese President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Joe Biden held a comprehensive virtual summit, discussing a range of issues from trade and climate cooperation to managing strategic competition and tensions over Taiwan.

Against a backdrop of continuous bilateral tension, Chinese President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Joe Biden held their first formal virtual summit. Both leaders agreed on the necessity of enhancing communication and managing competition responsibly to prevent it from escalating into conflict. Biden stressed the need to establish "guardrails" for the relationship, while Xi called for the relationship to return to a path of "sound and steady development." Although the summit did not resolve core disagreements on issues like Taiwan, human rights, and trade, both sides committed to maintaining contact and seeking potential cooperation on areas like climate change.

The meeting was internationally viewed as a crucial signal that U.S.-China relations had entered a "competitive coexistence" phase. From a conservative perspective, while the leaders agreed to manage differences, the core focus of the meeting remained on mutual strategic distrust and the bottom lines of competition, indicating that the structural conflicts between the two powers remained unchanged. It provided minimal assurance to global businesses that the relationship would not spiral entirely out of control, but also confirmed that great power competition would be the dominant geopolitical theme for decades to come.