Chinese President Xi Jinping will dine with “old friends” from Iowa during his visit to the U.S. for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, a summit that comes amid a period of mounting tension between Washington and Beijing, reports the Des Moines Register.

Former U.S. Ambassador to China Terry Branstad, a member of the delegation, told the outlet enmity toward Beijing was rising beyond U.S. borders.

“Not only in America, but it’s all over the world really. And it started really with COVID, and the fact that the Chinese were not honest or forthright with the fact that COVID started in China, and consequently I’ve read different things that the opinion of China in other parts of the world, whether it’s the United States, Japan, Australia, Europe, it’s not nearly what it used to be,” the former Iowa governor said.

“We all thought Xi Jinping would be a reformer like his father, with further opening up, and it’s gone the other way, with him becoming more authoritarian, and he’s consolidated power and given more authority to the Communist Party,” he said.

Ken Quinn, former U.S. ambassador to Cambodia and former president of the Des Moines-based World Food Prize, and Luca Berrone, the Des Moines businessman who spearheaded the relationship between eastern Iowa and Jinping, will also be in attendance.

President Joe Biden met with Xi Wednesday on the sidelines of the APEC summit, held in California, where the pair shook hands and spoke about ways to improve relations.

Xi called the relationship “the most important bilateral relationship in the world” and said he and Biden “shoulder heavy responsibilities for the two peoples, for the world, and for history.”

Biden said that the two countries should strive to make sure they do not “veer into conflict” and manage their relationship “responsibly.”

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