Car talk and birthday wishes underscore Biden’s ‘Trust but Verify’ diplomacy

In Washington, China’s President Xi Jinping is largely viewed as a mysterious autocrat who has long harbored a fatalistic view of his country’s relationship with the United States.

But for a moment Wednesday, at a century-old gilded mansion in the hills of Northern California, President Biden treated Mr. Xi like just another car guy.

“It’s a beautiful vehicle!” Mr Biden said as he walked the Chinese leader to his car, an 18-foot Hongqi armored sedan, after a long day of diplomatic wrangling, according to a video published by the state-run China Global Television Network.

“Show it to the president,” Mr. Xi said, chuckling, through an interpreter. Mr. Biden, whose love of muscle cars is so well known has been pruned of the satirical news site The Onion, peeked inside Mr. Xi’s car and then gestured to his own ride, a stubby armored Cadillac built like a rolling bunker.

“Do you know what they call that car?” Mr. Biden asked Mr. Xi. “They call it ‘The Beast.'”

Amid global tumult and simmering tensions between the United States and China, the two took time in their first meeting in a year to exchange the kind of awkward pleasantries that hostile leaders use when they want to be nice.

Mr Biden wished Mr Xi’s wife a happy birthday. Mr. Xi replied embarrassedly that he had forgotten that her birthday was approaching because he had been working so much. At another point, Mr. Biden waved a photo of a younger Mr. Xi standing on the Golden Gate Bridge.

“I said, ‘I wanted to show you a picture,’” Mr. Biden said Wednesday evening at a reception for leaders of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, where Mr. Xi did not attend. “He said, ‘I like that picture.’ Well, it was translated as: ‘I like that photo.'” At an expensive dinner across town, Mr. Xi hinted that giant pandas, which he called “envoys of friendship” between the two countries, could return to the United States. Only one U.S. zoo remains with a pair after the Smithsonian’s National Zoo in Washington returned two aging adult pandas and their cubs to China earlier this month, as previously agreed.

Biden ultimately broke the “Kumbaya” moment by telling reporters after the carefully coordinated summit that he still considered the Chinese leader a dictator. Mao Ning, a spokeswoman for China’s Foreign Ministry, called Biden’s comment “extremely wrong.”

Dealing with leaders who pursue unsavory policies is part of presidential diplomacy. Biden’s predecessor, Donald J. Trump, enjoyed interacting with such leaders — once during a friendly summit with Russia’s Vladimir V. Putin in Helsinki, and three times during meetings with North Korean dictator Kim Jong -un, whose top secret letters he kept in a box of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.

In 2009, President Barack Obama, seeking a peace deal between Israelis and Palestinians, invited autocratic Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to the White House. (He called for Mr. Mubarak’s ouster two years later, during the Arab Spring uprising.) In 1982, President Ronald Reagan honored Suharto, the Indonesian president who had presided over a massacre of approximately 400,000 members of an opposition party, at the White House for a state dinner.

In dealing with Mr. Xi and other leaders he has known for years, Mr. Biden employs a style rooted in nostalgia, without letting memories cloud his vision. He said he would “trust but verify” developments emerging from the summit, including curbing the flow of the chemical precursors to fentanyl and ensuring the two superpowers’ militaries communicate openly with each other.

Despite the warm gestures, Mr Biden still believes he is dealing with a dictator, as he told a reporter: “I mean, he is a dictator in the sense that he is a man who runs a country that – it is a communist country based on a form of government completely different from ours.”

The comment infuriated some Chinese officials but did not seem to resonate with Mr. Xi, who came to the United States to advocate American investment in his country at a time of high unemployment and low growth. (He still offered the pandas, after all.) Mr. Xi also collected tokens of affection during his trip to California, including a Golden State Warriors Jersey presented by Governor Gavin Newsom.

But ultimately, car talk and sports merchandise may only go so far in addressing the deep divisions between the two countries.

On Thursday, the two leaders came face to face again as they posed for a group photo at the conference — all smiling — and then took part in a planning session on climate change. At that event, Mr. Biden said that “the impacts of climate change are being felt most by the countries that contribute least to the problem, including developing countries,” and spoke at length about what the United States was doing to combat climate change. problem.

As Mr. Biden spoke, Mr. Xi stared into the distance for several minutes.