(Bloomberg) -- Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping shook hands at a hotel in Bali, Indonesia, on Monday before their first in-person meeting since Biden took office, one of the most closely watched encounters of his presidency
The two men met shortly after 5:30 p.m local time on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit. They were expected to talk for at least two hours, after which Biden plans to hold a news conference.
“Good to see you,” Biden said to Xi before they joined US and Chinese officials. The two sides sat at long conference tables with a display of flowers between them.
“We share a responsibility, in my view, to show China and the United States can manage our differences, prevent competition from coming anywhere near conflict, and find ways to work better together,” Biden said to kick off the talks.
“It’s good to see you,” Xi said through a translator.
“Currently, the China-US relationship is in such a situation that we all care a lot about it, because this is not the fundamental interest of our two countries and peoples and it’s not what the international community expects of us,” Xi added. He said the two sides “need to find the right direction” and “elevate the relationship.”
Before meeting Xi, Biden talked with the leaders of Japan, South Korea and Australia on Sunday, which White House officials described as preludes for the much-anticipated meeting with the Chinese leader. The president explained his approach and asked the US allies their concerns.
Biden separately used a summit in Cambodia with the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations to firm up relationships in a region where China is by far the top trading partner.
While US officials declined to spell out any specific outcomes they expect from the Xi meeting, they said he would seek to set guardrails around a relationship that has deteriorated since Biden took office -- bringing the two countries perilously close to economic or even military conflict. American partners wanted to see dialogue as the dominant feature of US efforts to foster stability in the Taiwan Strait, they said.
“We have very little misunderstanding,” Biden told reporters on Sunday in Cambodia. “We’ve just got to figure out where the red lines are and what we -- what are the most important things to each of us going into the next two years.”
US officials said negotiations about the meeting’s format went late into the night Sunday, predicting a highly scripted affair.
Senior Biden administration officials said Monday that relations have warmed somewhat simply by planning for the meeting with their Chinese counterparts, a process that’s taken about a month.
“We feel very good about the coordination and the foundation that we’ve set heading into Bali,” White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan told reporters a day before the meeting.