Tuesday briefing: Looking for a Biden-Xi meeting
Previewing a Biden-Xi meeting
President Biden and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, will meet tomorrow as the two try to maintain ties and as business leaders look for a thaw.
The summit will not end the standoff between the US and China, the world’s largest economies. But it is a sign that Biden and Xi want to continue ties despite trade tensions, tit-for-tat sanctions and questions about Taiwan’s future. The Dealbook newsletter looks at what’s at stake for the meeting.
U.S. officials have taken pains to emphasize that the U.S. and China are competitors, not zero-sum rivals. Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, has called the countries “economically interdependent,” and Janet Yellen, the Treasury Secretary, has warned that economic separation “would have significant global consequences.”
Common ground: The US hopes to resume military communications with China that were cut off after Representative Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan last year. The U.S. is also seeking cooperation on efforts to halt climate change and fentanyl trafficking; China is a major source of the drug.
About business: Many Western companies say it is becoming increasingly difficult to operate in China. But that may not matter to Xi. Images of the Chinese leader breaking bread with top American executives could be valuable enough for his home audience.
A history of grim views: A collection of Xi’s speeches from early in his rule shows how he has sometimes expressed an almost fatalistic belief — even before Beijing’s ties with Washington took a steep dive during the Trump administration — that China’s rise would lead to a backlash of western rivals.
Israeli troops reach Gaza’s main hospital
Israeli military vehicles advanced towards the gates of the besieged Al-Shifa hospital complex yesterday, Gaza health officials said.
Medicines and food are running out for the hundreds of patients and thousands of people who find shelter there. Without electricity or fuel, dozens of bodies are decomposing, a chief nurse and a health official say, and hospital staff are trying to keep premature babies warm after removing them from now useless incubators. A senior nurse said patients on ventilators were dying because there was little oxygen. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said a loss of power had led to at least 12 deaths.
Israeli officials say that beneath the hospital complex, a roughly 30-acre complex in Gaza City, lies a huge, underground Hamas command center, one of their main targets in the war. Hamas and doctors at the hospital deny the existence of such a command center.
Here’s the latest.
The Philippines releases a critic over its brutal drug war
The Philippines has released its most famous political prisoner, Leila de Lima, on bail. She was the public face of the opposition to former President Rodrigo Duterte’s brutal drug war, which killed thousands of people.
De Lima, a former senator who opened several investigations into Duterte’s anti-drug campaign, was indicted on charges of taking bribes from jailed drug traffickers. She has never been convicted, but has been in custody since February 2017.
Implications: De Lima’s release is likely to improve the Philippine government’s image abroad. Many Western lawmakers have advocated for her release to President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., who has made deepening his country’s alliance with Western governments a cornerstone of his foreign policy.
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Asiatic-Pacific
The U.S. headquarters of Myanmar’s unity government, created as an alternative to the junta that orchestrated a 2021 coup, operates from a co-working space in Washington, D.C., that is barely bigger than a cubicle. Its members must struggle for recognition amid global apathy and ignorance in a country that has never made Myanmar a foreign policy priority.
Here’s an in-depth look at their struggles.
Trees, with some help, can fight climate change
Restoring global forests where they naturally occur could potentially sequester an additional 226 gigatons of planet-warming carbon, equivalent to about a third of the amount humans have released since the dawn of the industrial age, according to a new study in the journal Nature.
The additional storage capacity would mainly come from existing forests being able to recover until they reach maturity. Sixty-one percent of that capacity would come from protecting existing forests and the remaining 39 percent from growing trees in deforested areas with a low human footprint.
But trees are far from a panacea for climate change. Thomas Crowther, senior author of the study and professor of ecology, worries that countries and companies will continue to treat them that way and use forests for carbon offsets to enable the continued use of fossil fuels.