Few, least of all China's President Xi Jinping, will fail to recognize that beleaguered '24 reelection hopeful Joe Biden desperately needs to come away from summit meetings that commence between the two in San Francisco Wednesday with some negotiated concessions to brag about.
And why not?
After all, Xi must also calculate that a Biden reelection loss will likely bring back that orange-haired guy who is a whole lot harder to deal with: the fellow who imposed fair trade sanctions on Chinese exports; imposed a China Initiative against high tech university and industrial spying; cancelled the Iran Nuclear Deal and sanctioned Tehran's urgently needed oil exports to China; and built up America's military following years of Obama-Biden administration neglect.
The summit between Biden and Xi and their negotiators follows a series of U.S. policy setbacks and White House snubs including skipped presidential discussions and executive-level meetings that appear intended to showcase Chinese preeminent dominance on the world stage.
Xi declined to take an attempted phone call from Biden for two weeks after he gave the order to shoot down a large Chinese spy balloon.
This belated action in response to media pressure also derailed a planned visit to Beijing by Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
As reported in The Wall Street Journal, by the time Blinken managed to get an audience with Xi months later, "he was made to look like a supplicant in Chinese state media, seated off to the side of a long table in the Great Hall of the People, rather than being placed next to Xi, as Blinken's predecessor was."
Adding personal insult, U.S. officials reported that around the time of Blinken's trip, Chinese hackers breached the unclassified email accounts of his top aides and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo.
Then, six weeks before finally agreeing to a summit with Biden, Chinese officials had floated an embarrassing Xi trip itinerary that would begin with a banquet dinner with American business leaders.
Beijing negotiators ultimately backed down to White House objections and rescheduled the dinner until after center stage discussions with President Biden.
After all, if they want Joe to win, they'll have to make some visible symbolic concessions to make him look good to his remaining far left base at home.
Maybe throw in some climate concern claims ... like offer to sell us some discounted zero-emission solar panels and wind turbines as they build the equivalent of a new coal-fired plant weekly and order more than 100 million barrels of oil daily each from Iran and Russia to support their wars in Israel and Ukraine, respectively.
They might even discuss China's role in producing fentanyl that is freely flowing across Biden's open southern border killing hundreds of thousands of Americans.
In exchange, likely expect Xi to seek Biden administration reassurances on Taiwan that it will urge Democrat political leaders to back off on opposition to Beijing's goal of unification until they can achieve that objective over another four-year presidential term.
A '24 Democrat presidential and congressional win would also stave off a return to more Trump restrictions on technology transfers and U.S. energy-driven economic competitiveness against a current deeply distressed Chinese economy.
Meanwhile, Beijing is working to create an alternative to undermine and replace the U.S. dollar as the world's reserve currency, a system which enables enforcement of sanctions against adversarial regimes.
China has already entered into agreements with BRICS countries — including Brazil, Russia, India, and Iran — as well as various Middle Eastern nations — to settle trade disputes in local currencies.
Through its Belt and Road Initiative, China has become the largest source of international development finance with exports to partner countries which now exceed those to the U.S., EU, and Japan.
Beijing's trade relationships provide political as well as economic clout to undermine U.S. interests. As reported by Financial Times, between 2013 and 2020, Belt and Road nations voted with Chinese positions at the United Nations 75% of the time.
Regarding political leverage, as revealed in bank records now being routinely released in connection with an ongoing congressional Biden impeachment investigation, Beijing allegedly has many scandal-based intimidating, manipulative buttons to push against seemingly compromising personal and family business transactions, with which it likely is aware of, if not complicit.
Included is a $40,000 check to President Biden that House investigators say was part of a payoff to "the big guy" from a lucrative deal with CEFC, a now-defunct Chinese Communist Party-linked energy company, when he was vice president.
A recorded November 2020 lecture by Di Dongsheng, a prominent Chinese political science professor, boasted that Beijing had infiltrated "people at the top of America's core inner circle," with direct references to then-President-elect Joe Biden's son Hunter and his business dealings in the Communist country.
Di said that under President Donald Trump, "During the U.S.-China trade war, [Wall Street] tried to help and I know that my friends on the U.S. side told me that they tried to help, but they couldn't do much," adding that a Biden presidency would benefit China.
The audience can be heard laughing in the background as Di explained, "Trump has been saying that Biden's son has some sort of global foundation. Have you noticed that? Who helped [Hunter] build the foundations? Got it? There are a lot of deals inside all these."
There should be little humor in this for those of us counting on Joe playing tic-tac-toe against Xi's Chinese checkers.
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and the graduate space architecture program. His latest of 12 books is "Architectures Beyond Boxes and Boundaries: My Life By Design" (2022). Read Larry Bell's Reports — More Here.
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