President Joe Biden spoke with Chinese President Xi Jinping by phone Wednesday evening for the first time since he took office, the White House said. The White House said in a statement that Biden raised “fundamental concerns” about Beijing’s “coercive and unfair economic practices, crackdown in Hong Kong, human rights abuses in Xinjiang, and increasingly assertive actions in the region, including toward Taiwan.”
The statement said the leaders also discussed countering the Covid-19 pandemic and “the shared challenges of global health security, climate change, and preventing weapons proliferation.” Officials said Biden also planned to express his hope that the two leaders could cooperate on such issues as nuclear nonproliferation and climate change. The call between the leaders of the world’s two largest economies, coming three weeks after Biden’s inauguration, follows a review of core elements of U.S. policy toward China during the Trump administration and extensive consultation with America’s allies, the officials said. One of them described Biden as being “in a strong position” to have a substantive conversation with Xi. Biden first got to know Xi as vice president at a time when it was clear that Xi would rise to the presidency. A senior administration official said Biden went into the phone call “practical, hard-headed, clear-eyed.”
