BEIJING—Chinese leader Xi Jinping used a meeting with U.S. national-security adviser Jake Sullivan to push for stability in ties between the two global powers, seeking to define the relationship in ways that favor Beijing as the U.S. presidential election draws near.
Sullivan has met this week in Beijing with several top Chinese leaders who stressed the importance of following through on agreements between President Biden and Xi at a summit in California last November, during which Biden pledged to avoid a new Cold War with China and to seek more areas of cooperation.
Xi told Sullivan that the U.S. and China “should be a source of stability for world peace,” and that he hoped the U.S. would see China’s development in a positive light, according to a Chinese summary of the encounter.
The White House said Xi and Biden were planning a call in the coming weeks, and Sullivan said at a press conference in Beijing on Thursday that the two leaders may meet in person by the end of the year. Sullivan’s schedule included a rare meeting with a senior Chinese military official, a sign of Beijing’s willingness to maintain communication.
After Sullivan’s meetings with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, the White House said that winning the release of Americans deemed wrongfully detained in China or otherwise barred from leaving the country was a priority for the rest of Biden’s time in office.
For months, China’s leadership has been girding itself for the possibility of another Trump administration and the unpredictability it might bring, but Vice President Kamala Harris’s arrival as a strong challenger for the U.S. presidency provides fresh impetus for Beijing to try to solidify a delicate rapprochement with Washington that has taken shape over the past year.
Sullivan told reporters that during his meetings with Chinese officials he shared his experience of working with Harris over the past four years, and said she represented continuity with the Biden administration in seeking to ensure U.S.-China competition doesn’t turn into conflict.
“They recognize that elections are sensitive periods,” Sullivan said at a press conference, adding that his visit to Beijing during such a moment was an effort to manage ties responsibly.
With less than six months until Biden leaves office, Beijing wants Harris—if she wins—to feel bound to carry forward agreements reached by Biden and Xi, said Daniel Russel, a former senior State Department official now at the Asia Society Policy Institute.
“PRC officials want to cement these as a legacy that binds Harris,” he said, referring to the People’s Republic of China.
Biden’s time in office has been marked by slow, grinding diplomacy with Beijing. Officials including Sullivan have sought to keep the world’s top two economies from veering into conflict while building a united front of allies to jointly oppose what they view as China’s efforts to undermine the international order, including through its increasingly close ties with Moscow.
Unlike a drama-filled prisoner swap with Russia earlier this month, the Biden administration’s diplomacy with China has been far more subtle. The relationship deteriorated so badly over incidents such as a visit to Taiwan by then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) in 2022 and the appearance of a suspected Chinese spy balloon over the U.S. last year that merely establishing channels to communicate with one another was considered a breakthrough.
On Thursday, Sullivan was granted a meeting with Gen. Zhang Youxia, becoming the first national-security adviser to meet with a vice chairman of China’s Central Military Commission since 2016.
“I know it is rare that we have the opportunity to have this kind of exchange,” Sullivan told Zhang. He later told reporters that he used the meeting to clarify U.S. intentions and concerns across a range of sensitive military issues while also listening to China’s perspective.
In dispatching Sullivan to Beijing, the Biden administration is also thinking about firming up its legacy, said Lily McElwee, an expert on U.S.-China ties at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, with several concrete items still on the table.
In addition to the release of detained Americans, the U.S. hopes to get more help from China in cutting off supplies of chemicals used to make synthetic opioids such as fentanyl.
China’s readout, by contrast, stressed longer-term objectives that will define U.S.-China relations for years after Biden has left office, and focused on changing what it sees as an overly aggressive posture by the U.S. in dealing with China.
From Beijing’s vantage point, the U.S. viewing China as a potential adversary forms the basis for specific policies that seek to block Chinese access to sensitive U.S. technology or curtail it from exporting electric cars and other goods to the U.S. market.
“The key to keeping China-U.S. relations on the right path lies in how the two heads of state steer the ship,” Wang said, according to China’s statement on the Sullivan meetings.
Unlike Biden and Trump—two officials with whom Beijing is deeply familiar—Harris represents a unique challenge in that she is largely an unknown quantity in China.
The working assumption for many experts on the relationship is that her relatively thin foreign-policy experience means she would borrow heavily from the Biden playbook, at least initially. How she would behave in a potential crisis is far harder to determine. Beijing would ultimately be looking for signs based on whom she selects in her senior China team.
“Honestly, the Chinese are in a holding pattern,” said Yun Sun, director of the China program at the Stimson Center, a Washington think tank. From the response to Sullivan’s visit, “you get a strong sense that China has used the opportunity to reiterate its positions on bilateral relations, in the hope to set precedents and rules for the next administration.”
The signaling to Harris by Beijing will be for naught if former President Donald Trump wins in November. In that case, Chinese leaders would be forced to return to the intense haggling over tariffs that defined his first term. It would be a familiar, yet also volatile, dynamic for Chinese officials involved in previous negotiations with Trump.
Write to Brian Spegele at Brian.Spegele@wsj.com
