Biden and Xi are to meet next week. There is no detail too small to sweat

WASHINGTON – When President Joe Biden meets Chinese chief Xi Jinping on Wednesday, there shall be no such factor as a small detail.

How they greet? If they devour? Where they sit down? Will there be plant life? Bottled water or in a tumbler? “Pretty intense,” senior management officers say of navigating refined protocols.

Any come across involving the president and a international chief way managing difficult logistics, political and cultural, and each and every prevalence or utterance can doubtlessly jolt the world order. But few international locations are extra attuned to etiquette than the Chinese, and Washington and Beijing’s often-conflicting pursuits would possibly imply the apparently trivial turns into significant.

There’s most definitely “very detailed planning of the actual choreography of who enters a room where, if there will be pictures taken and all of that,” mentioned Bonny Lin, senior fellow for Asian safety and director of the China Power Project on the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Biden and Xi will meet whilst each attend next week’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in San Francisco, however even elementary information has remained closely guarded. Statements Friday through China’s govt didn’t point out the day or location, and the White House says best that the face-to-face shall be held “in the Bay area,” bringing up safety issues.

That may just best build up the force as either side doubtlessly haggle over the whole lot from assembly time and duration to who enters the room first. Will they use a desk or simple chairs? What about safety presence and interpreter get right of entry to?

Then there is the extra clearly substantive: whether or not there shall be a post-meeting joint remark and how a lot of the consultation shall be in public view.

The plan is to put aside sufficient time for in-depth conversations on problems that shall be divided into other periods, senior management officers say. That recollects Biden’s just about three-hour meeting with Xi ahead of the beginning of remaining yr’s G-20 summit in Bali.

The officers additionally famous that this shall be Xi’s first travel to the U.S. in six years, and his first to San Francisco since he was once a provincial Communist Party secretary.

Victor Cha, former Director for Asian Affairs at the White House’s National Security Council, mentioned organizing such conferences at APEC is more uncomplicated than at a proper location. But, he mentioned, hammering out talks on summit sidelines is nonetheless “a logistics nightmare.”

“China, normally, if they come to United States, they want everything. They want all the pomp and circumstance. They want the highest possible respect that can be paid to them,” Cha mentioned. “That is politically not possible. And so, having APEC in San Francisco solves that problem in the sense that it’s not the official White House that’s hosting the meeting.”

Even casual settings can deliver prime stakes.

When President Richard Nixon visited China in 1972, aiming to ease many years of animosity, he introduced a brand new pair of brogues with rubber soles to climb the Great Wall.

President Barack Obama and Xi didn’t put on ties all the way through their 2013 assembly at Sunnylands, a luxurious, modernist mansion in Rancho Mirage close to Palm Springs, California. It was once news then that Obama stayed in a single day there whilst the Chinese delegation returned to a close-by resort.

Donald Trump and Xi wore darkish fits for dinner at Mar-a-Lago 4 years later, and the meal featured what the then-president known as “the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake.”

Bonnie Glaser, managing director of the Indo-Pacific program at the German Marshall Fund, said that, for the upcoming meeting, Xi’s team likely pushed for a venue away from the APEC site and talks lasting longer than Bali’s.

“The Chinese want a separate summit,” she mentioned.

The Chinese attach importance to the location, which this time may be more like Sunnylands than Anchorage, where top U.S. and Chinese officials held rather tense 2021 talks. Chinese state media might fixate on the weather as a barometer for bilateral relations. Early forecasts are calling for rain with a high in the mid-60s for San Francisco.

Even on-site flowers could be important, as certain choices can symbolize harmony in Chinese culture. Plum blossom is a well-liked flower known in China for persevering amid harshness, while lotuses convey peace in the Chinese language. Chrysanthemums, by contrast, are associated with death.

Xi may expect Biden to greet him upon arrival. His team could also want him and Biden photographed together without staff to convey a personal relationship.

“Chinese officials will want to project to their domestic audience that Xi is received by Biden with dignity and respect,” said Ryan Hass, director of the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institute. He suggested that required “imagery of both leaders interacting on a personal basis, beyond the customary handshake in front of a bank of flags in a hotel conference room.”

That may well be so simple as a brief stroll in combination, Hass mentioned. The Chinese additionally generally tend to emphasize meals and would possibly push for a meal.

During Nixon’s 1971 discuss with, an army honor guard greeted him on the airport, however the much-watched collection of toasts from either side got here later, best after a shark fin ceremonial dinner dish was once served. China introduced a Texas-style fish fry at a luxurious Beijing resort to fete President George H.W. Bush in 1989, however blocked his invitation of Fang Lizhi, then the rustic’s best-known dissident.

The APEC atmosphere precludes a proper dinner. But lunch is conceivable. That’s in spite of Xi scheduling his journeys down to the minute and usally packing in such a lot that there is no time to devour, in accordance to a documentary on its diplomatic rules China launched in 2017.

Both facets additionally all the time have safety issues. Obama wrote in his memoir of his 2009 China travel that his staff was once “instructed to leave any non-governmental electronic devices on the plane” and to function assuming “that our communications were being monitored” and hotel rooms had hidden cameras.

Hillary Clinton’s 1995 Beijing discuss with grew to become heads for a special explanation why when she declared that “human rights are women’s rights, and women’s rights are human rights.” So did Laura Bush’s 2008 trip to the Olympics in Beijing after she stopped in Thailand and visited a refugee camp for people fleeing the government of China-backed Myanmar.

But protocols around U.S.-China leader interactions don’t always have to address espionage threats or human rights matters.

Sasha Obama was 9 and studying Mandarin in grade school when she practiced a few phrases during a 2011 White House welcome ceremony for Chinese President Hu Jintao. When she and her sister, Malia, visited China with their mother, Michelle, on a goodwill tour three years later, the Chinese press dubbed the then-first lady “Mrs. Diplomatic.”

That travel featured a toboggan experience clear of the click after a Great Wall discuss with, and a sport of desk tennis the place Michelle Obama joked that her husband performed the sport and “thinks he’s better than he really is.” Yet what unfolded felt stiff to some. The write-up in The New York Times carried the headline: “Even With Ping-Pong, a Formal Meeting in China.”

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Associated Press author Colleen Long contributed to this record.