Biden will meet Chinese President Xi Jinping in person for the first time in a year on Wednesday during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in San Francisco.
“The president is determined to see the re-establishment of military-to-military ties because he believes it’s in the U.S. national security interest,” Sullivan said in an interview with CBS
Sullivan said on CNN’s “State of the Union” that Biden would seek to “advance the ball” on military ties during his meeting with Xi, but declined to provide further details.
The Biden-Xi meeting is expected to cover global issues from the Israel-Hamas war to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, North Korea’s ties with Russia, Taiwan, the Indo-Pacific, human rights, fentanyl production, artificial intelligence, as well as “fair” trade and economic relations, a senior U.S. official said.
They cleaned up the homeless people on the streets just to make way for this meeting. Incredible.
they actually went around and redid roads, curbs, and sidewalks in the general area. they repainted the lines on the roads. they (re?)painted the overpasses so they look nicer from underneath.
they opened a bunch of outdoor stalls in Chinatown and they’re keeping them running late into the night, giving the appearance that it’s a bustling diverse area that people frequent long after most of the businesses are closed.
From my experience on a normal evening most of Chinatown closes around 6pm and it becomes more of a ghost town than a bustling market.
They’ve been running state news propaganda about it non-stop for the past couple weeks. They love to talk about cleaning up SF’s image from a dystopian nightmare into some sort of world renowned vibrant bastion of freedom, safety, and wealth.
it’s disturbing
In North Korea, they pay actors to wander around the one mall in Pyongyang in order to make the country look not like an impoverished communist hellhole
If that were real it would still be a better jobs program than anything the US puts out.
Lol you’re totally right, all this is just the sort of thing that Americans accuse the DPRK of doing for western tourists.
SF cleaning up their house before guests come over to stay… I would love to see chinese media(or documentary or something) going to SF and on one street seeing a bunch of luxery cars, fancy dressed people, expensive ass restaurants and literally next street over bunch of homeless struggling to survive and do some story… maybe even pull some “fake and dystopian city”(like America loves to do with China and DPRK) stuff before and after the “clean up”
Chinese media never publishes shit like this even though it’s so obvious out of what I assume to be some weird honor code only they follow (they literally banned making korean war movies in the early 2000s to “avoid harming the feelings of the American people”). I wish one day CCTV or something would just walk around the Tenderloin or Skid Row with a camera or some smth and get all the liberals to stfu but they’d never do it.
i feel the same way… if they could just manage to scoot a few blocks off the beaten path and make it to the Tenderloin they’d get just a glimpse of what it’s really like here
Tbh I feel like the Tenderloin would be the nice part of the downtown area in most midwestern cities.
The entire SOMA area is sorta sketchy tbh
they literally banned making korean war movies in the early 2000s to “avoid harming the feelings of the American people”).
Tbf, this policy has clearly since been reversed
“Potemkin village” is the correct word, western propaganda love to use it in their projections.
You know, I did not foresee America turning San Fransisco into a Potemkin village for the general secretary of the communist party of China. But I do find it kind of funny
Yeah, it was certainly not on my bingo card.
I’m on the record as being a San Francisco stan. Ignore all the liberalism and techbro crap - it’s still the most beautiful city in the US by a good margin. Walking around the city during the day is a genuinely nice experience.
But yeah, after dark it’s like the whole city shuts down. I mean, yeah obviously it doesn’t literally close up but I’ve walked through Chinatown, down Market, through Russian Hill etc at night and it’s almost disturbingly empty of bustling night life you’d expect from a city like that.
The best Chinese restaurants in SF are out in Richmond/Sunset, not Chinatown.
Change my mind.
You don’t have to comrade.
What do you like in Chinatown? Every time I’ve gone, I’ve left sort of disappointed.
Genuinely? I barely go to the city anymore. And when I do it usually has something to do with golden gate park. So richmond/sunset works well. The few times I’ve been in chinatown I’ve been dissapointed.
The right parts of richmond/sunset are just as chinese but less touristy. Better food for locals.
They cleaned up the homeless people on the streets
That means they got to have baths and wash their clothes, right?
🙂
It would have been a nice moral flex to publicly insist on not doing that.
“In China we do not have an issue with homelessness. We ensure that every person has a home to live in since we guarantee that for everyone. As I walk around San Francisco, I’m delighted to see that clearly the US must have similar policies”.
Not really sure I understand what some folks are saying in this thread. China meeting with the US is good. Deescalation is good. China’s winning. The longer no war breaks out the more China’s economy develops, the further China pulls away from the United States. Even if war is inevitable, more time only benefits the Chinese, and they’re not going to poke the insane bear and risk the lives of billions. China does not want WWIII, we shouldn’t either. All high level meetings between Chinese and US officials are something to celebrate because there’s nothing the US can do to stop China. This is not a Chinese foreign policy L.
Whatever happens there i rather cannot imagine China backing up before the US irrational demands or the USA abandoning any of it.
China is negotiating from a position of strength and knows it. Question is whether the American side also knows this or if they will continue to delude themselves.
This is the correct take.
We were always at war with [Scary Muslims]. We were never at war with [Scary East Asians]The US wouldn’t dare messing with the scary East Asians.
What are the odds they get Xi with some radiation tech to give him cancer a few years later down the road? Seriously why would he ever step foot in America rn
Eh, Chinas gotta do realpolitik and also I think nuclear powers trying to cool tensions is a good thing even if it means you gotta jerk some Libs off.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen tensions cool off after US China meeting in the last 3 years
It usually ends up with US putting out an aggressive statement
It still is to the benefit of China’s foreign relations in general to offer reasonable, cooperative proposals and then have them be rejected. It makes the US look terrible.
I’m mostly shook Xi decided to go tbh
Should’ve only sent Wang to snub the US and not risk any ClA ops like with COVID
Nobody in the world can afford to piss off the United States.
After throwing tantrum for a while, both China and the US realize that they ultimately need one another.
It’s an abusive relationship, it’s never easy to get out. China thought it could leave America and get intimate with the failson Russia, who is ultimately too poor and useless to keep China’s massive economy on track. Only America’s deep consumer market can possibly satisfy China’s vast manufacturing industrial capacity.
That’s not to say decoupling is not possible, it’s simply very painful, and like all abusive relationships, it’s harder to leave than you think. Many eventually go back to their abusers after a while.
The US doesn’t have the nerve to do something like that.
The Chinese government has always been disappointingly naive with the US. It’s embarrassing sometimes.
maoist deep state conspiracy to instigate a bo xilai redemption arc
The Great Khan tidies up an important port city of the Western Horde in preparation for the arrival of the Son of Heaven.
Come on Xi, do something funny
This is the culmination of comrade BayArea415’s work. The revolution is beginning
Please Xi bring some high speed rail with you. I need a silver lining to this week-long APEC fiasco in my town.
So new chip sanctions will be announced on Thursday ig
Yeah they always tend to do something like that day later.
China seems determined to sleep walk into WW3
What else can China do? Normalization with the US is the only way forward for them.
Over the past few months, China has experienced a political shakeup that has not occurred since the Cultural Revolution.
First, purge of the PLA high command (Li Shangfu still hasn’t resurfaced since his disappearance) and PLA’s Rocket Force chief replaced (Wang Houbin from PLA Navy replacing Xu Xisheng).
Meanwhile, the top echelons of PLA Rocket Force is being investigated for “corruption scandal” (Li Yuchao et al.)
Foreign Minister Qin Gang sacked.
Li Keqiang dead.
Finance Minister replaced (Lan Foan replacing Liu Kun)
Head of Central Bank replaced (Pan Gongsheng replacing Yi Gang)
Then there’s a rumor from Western media about a submarine incident in the Yellow Sea.
Xi’s political position is more precarious than ever. Biden has made incisive political, economic and financial offensives against China, and China is only starting to realize that de-dollarization is not so easy after all.
idk if i would read into a couple of purges and changes of personel with such negative and “china observer” like analysis.
We know the long standing issues of the PLA and how it improved and modernized a lot under Xi’s tenure (often with purges like this) and we know there are different wings and interests inside the CPC. Whose to say that this isnt a case of Xi consolidating a more loyal and competent comand. Or that its indeed a corruption case which extremely realistic given PLA in the last 20 years and so despite a very widespread and successfull anti corruption campaign you can still find big names lacking. Or that they were found out to have a mistress like a couple of big officials in the last few months.
“Political shake up that has not occured since the cultural revolution” seems like a quite overblown take at the very least given the things you listed. China had self contained political crises in the 80s ,90s ,00s and 10s that saw “shake ups” much more dramatic and in scale. Hell the anti-corruption campaign that i mentioned saw like 500k mid, low and high level party officials and army officers purged. The “shake up” during zero covid and before the party’s congress also seemed much more important than whatever this is.
In the end of the day under Xi the biggest shake up has occured. That in a way “Politics are in command” in much more real sense than they have been in 40+ years. That new reality foundementaly makes staff changes, purges and shake ups in positions much more common than they were in lets say 90s-early 10s .And that shouldnt immediately be thought of as a negative or as a measure of instability, or that Xi positions is more precarious than ever. I simply dont see it.
Also repeating the completely and utterly unsubstantiated submarine incident rumor as something that even remotely can lend more merit to your analysis makes it more flimsy.
The source (Lude media) has no credibility and then the guy who originaly (and only) put the story out in western twitter claiming he also veryfied it ,H I Sutton, isnt a particularly trustworthy figure in the PLA watching sphere. He run with the “there is a coup against Xi” and “China is hiding 20 million covid deaths” stories last year and the manner in which the story broke was at best shaky. For example Lude media has written a rather defensive follow up tweet stating that the supposed incident occurred in the Yellow Sea and nothing occurred in the Taiwan strait, and that people saying it happened in the Taiwan strait are 50 cent shills, essentially claiming it is disinformation. Of course, it is rather confusing, as it was Lude media himself who first stated so confidently that he had top secret information, and that among other details he had access to, that this happened in the Taiwan strait (“在执行台海任务时出事”). And both had follow up tweets walking back on the claims saying that it is unconfirmed and to treat with great caution (and if im not mistaken they later delete dtheir original posts). And then nothing . There here’s been no other news sites reporting this, even anti-china ones , and had the Chinese somehow lost a sub in the Taiwan Strait or SCS, the ereaand the skies above it would be full of Chinese ships and aircraft on search and rescue missions, and all of the traffic and survailance on the erea would see it and report it. There’s no way such an effort could go unnoticed in such a busy water ways. Nothing came out of it an dnothing was reported.
But lets ignore that the submarine thing as a misstep. I see little reason to think Xi is going to meet biden from a position of weakness even if there is relative weakness in some apsects of the economic sphere as you claim.
The collapse of Ukraine’s offensive against Russian forces , its commander’s admission that the war is a “stalemate” and the slow but certain shift in narrative is a setback for America’s strategic geopolitical position and a gain for China and the end of the war seems to be shifting towards a net loss for the US and a net gain for China. And Russia itself isnt a market or economic hub that can be handwaived as easily as you think. China has doubled its exports to Russia since the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, has increased their coordination with Moscow in almost all foreign actions and have secured or are in the process of securing energy and food security configurations they could not expect some years prior
The US tech war on China has mostly flopped, with even western think tanks and pushers of the sanctions admitting deffeat or panicking to double down. America’s restrictions on high-end chip exports to China failed to prevent Huawei Technologies from offering a new smartphone as well as Artificial Intelligence processors with performance comparable to or close to what’s achieved by the products of Nvidia and other US designers. Huawai is expanding both domesticaly and worldwide and so do other chip and tech companies America tried to strangle. Chinese and SEA market is increasingly being caprtured by China and so is the developing world and the lead in 5g tech and applications only grows larger . The mate60 came out of no where and Chinese AI firms buy fast Huawei processers in place of chips from Nvidia and other US producers. US,japanese and Korean tech firms lost and are losing markets of ~2 billion peope and they are in a positionf of weakness right now, many begging the US regime to change approach and course
The Isreili war on Gaza and the US response gives China a free option to act as the de facto leader of the Global South in opposition to Israel, an American ally even by simply not doing much and simply watch the US losing their hold in PR and public opinion in lot of the developing world. US prob spend tens of billions in worldwide media and NGO campaigns to undermine China’s image and postive attitudes towards it but all that effort has been at the very least counteracted it by the last month;s impact on West’s and US’s image for billions. Also China now exports more to the Muslim world than it does to the United States and more to the developing world than they do to US+EU+Japan+Korea+Canada
Also the US military ,despite what the political hawks are pushing for, really wants to avoid confrontation with China in the Northwest Pacific region as well as its home waters in the South China Sea, where the PLA’s thousands of surface-to-ship missiles and nearly 1,000 fourth- and fifth-generation warplanes give China an overwhelming home-theater advantage in firepower. By most credible voices ,both official and unoffical, China holds a distinct advantage in the erea and can achieve right now a ,costly for itself but even more costly for the US in more way than material, win in a military campaign against Taiwan.ANd that will become increasingly more true over the next decade
LA Rocket Force “is the largest ground-based missile force in the world, with over 2,200 conventionally armed ballistic and cruise missiles and with enough anti-ship missiles to attack every US surface combatant vessel in the South China Sea with enough firepower to overcome each ship’s missile defense,” Major Christopher J. Mihal wrote in 2021 in a US Army journal.
If you think this is just a “please give us money” and not the realistic analysis a lot in the US military are having you are mistaken.
We got a taste of the Biden-Xi discussions from Newsom’s visit (who is also the likeliest 2024 Democratic presidential candidate should Biden withdraw for health reasons) . Newsom has been quoted as saying that he had “expressed my support for the One-China policy … as well as our desire not to see independence” of Taiwan. Clear rejection of Taiwanese independence contrasts with the approach and statements of the last few years of almost all US officials including Biden who will likely echo such retorical pull back in the next few months. It doesnt mean too much materialy but its an important point of where the wind is shifting and with teh upcoming Taiwanese elections in mind and the weakening of the DPP positions.
Thats all to say that yeah (de)dolarization matters, yeah US financial capital hegemony and capabilities matter but they dont come or exist from without. Their strength and usability is at some point a function of the material,political and social base and on the ground contradictions both domesticaly and abroad matter more long term. Each global or geopolitical crisis or event of the last few years has “trickled down” much more instability and rot in the US political and social fabric than it did for China and provided much more fertile ground for counterhegemonic developments in the developing world , even if one can say that China and Russia didnt take advantage of them as much as they could. US financial hegemony doesnt exist outside of politics or (geo)politics in “people” centered sense even if we might still be far from the US domestic contradictions and global crises having significant impact on the ability and effectiveness of it to act and react in the way it needs to to “win” (but we also might be closer than we think). US might have gotten a lot of economy related “wins” already in Ukraine for example but in a long term PoV im not sure “putting EU back in its place” and having them on a geopolitical and economic leash is enough considering the changes it kickstarted and accelerated domsetcialy and abroad and especially their consolidation given the likely outcome
There’s no such thing as normalization talks with the US, the Americans are serious about pushing this confrontation to its logical conclusion
What DC wants is breathing room to deal with Ukraine and the middle east and if China just hands that room to them then it’ll be China at a disadvantage tomorrow
China scales more rapidly than the US. In the information era, China should not confront the US without total semiconductor superiority.
idk about normalization, decoupling in my little corner of the world continues apace. kylin is set to replace windows on all government related terminals by 2025 (fucking finally, i might add) and there has been a massive uptick in pentest jobs across the board. military adjacent project prereqs getting progressively stricter and big cuts in bureaucrat/civil servant tenures. feels more like theyre battening down the hatches for a big one
What military ties is Biden looking for?
the US military and the PLA used to have a communication channel which the PRC severed not long ago (I believe it was over the weather balloon hysteria and shootdown)
Why do I feel like “military to military ties” are just “Give us all the chips we need to build our military so we can crush you please. Also if you give us a detailed description of all your military plans in the event of a war with us that’d be great too.”
BEAT HIS ASS
- xi has the chance to do the funniest thing ever.
