LIMA, Peru (AP) — President Joe Biden is expected to use his final meeting with China's leader, Xi Jinping, to urge him to dissuade North Korea from further deepening its support for Russia's war on Ukraine.
Saturday's talks on the sidelines of the annual in Peru come just over two months before Biden leaves office and makes way for Republican President-elect . It will be Biden's — someone the Democrat saw as his most consequential peer on the world stage.
With the final meeting, officials say Biden will be looking for Xi to to prevent an already dangerous moment with North Korea from further escalating.
Biden on Friday, along with South Korean President Yoon Seok Yul and Japan's Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, to send thousands of troops to help Moscow repel Ukrainian forces who have seized territory in Russia's Kursk border region.
Biden called it “dangerous and destabilizing cooperation.”
White House officials also have expressed frustration with Beijing, which accounts for the vast majority of North Korea's trade, for not doing more to rein in Pyongyang.
Biden, Yoon and Ishiba spent most of their 50-minute discussion focused on the issue, agreeing it “should not be in Beijing’s interest to have this destabilizing cooperation in the region," according to a senior administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss their private conversations.
The North Koreans also have provided Russia with artillery and other munitions, according to U.S. and South Korean intelligence officials. And the U.S., Japan and South Korea have expressed alarm over Pyongyang’s stepped-up .
Kim ordered testing exercises in the lead-up to this month’s U.S. election and is claiming progress on efforts to build .
Biden and Xi have much beyond North Korea to discuss, including , human rights issues, technology and Taiwan, the self-ruled democracy that Beijing claims as its own. Both presidents started their day at the leaders' retreat at the APEC summit.
There's also about what lies ahead in the U.S.-China relationship under Trump, who campaigned promising to levy on Chinese imports.
Already, many American companies, including Nike and eyewear retailer Warby Parker, have been diversifying their sourcing away from China. Shoe brand Steve Madden says it plans to by as much as 45% next year.
“When Xi meets with Biden, part of his audience is not solely the White House or the U.S. government,” said Victor Cha, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “It’s about American CEOs and continued U.S. investment or trying to renew U.S. investment in China and get rid of the perception that there’s a hostile business environment in China.”
White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said Biden administration officials will advise the Trump team that managing the intense competition with Beijing will likely be the most significant foreign policy challenge they will face.
Administration officials are concerned that tensions between China and Taiwan could devolve into all-out war if there is a miscalculation by either side, with catastrophic consequences for the world.
Sullivan said the Trump administration will have to deal with the Chinese military's frequent harassment of its regional neighbors.
in the disputed South China Sea have become a persistent problem. Chinese coast guard ships also regularly approach disputed Japanese-controlled East China Sea islands near Taiwan.
Ishiba met with Xi on Friday. Afterward, the Japanese prime minister said he told Xi he was "extremely concerned about the situation in the East China Sea and escalating activity of the People’s Liberation Army.”
The White House worked for months to arrange Saturday's meeting between Xi and Biden, something the Democrat badly wanted to do before leaving office in January.
Sullivan traveled to Beijing in late August to meet with his Chinese counterpart and also . Beijing agreed to the meeting earlier this week.
It's a big moment for Biden as he wraps up more than 50 years in politics. He saw his relationship with Xi as among the most consequential on the international stage and put much effort into cultivating that relationship.
Biden and Xi first got to know each other on travels across the U.S. and China when both were vice presidents, interactions that both have said left a lasting impression.
But the last four years have presented a steady stream of difficult moments.
The FBI this week into efforts to hack into U.S. telecommunications networks. The initial findings have revealed a “broad and significant” aimed at stealing information from Americans who work in government and politics.
U.S. intelligence officials also have assessed China of machine tools, microelectronics and other technology that Moscow is using to produce missiles, tanks, aircraft and other weaponry for use in .
And tensions flared last year after Biden ordered the shooting down of a Chinese spy balloon that traversed the United States.
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Associated Press writer Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo contributed.
