Biden’s Goal in Meeting With Xi: Avoid a Spiraling Conflict

When President Biden meets President Xi Jinping of China at a lush estate on the edge of Silicon Valley on Wednesday, his primary goal will be simple: find a way to avoid an increasingly bitter competition with China from tipping into conflict.

For two leaders who have agreed on very little as their nations have spiraled into their worst relationship in four decades, there have been hints of how they will try to nudge toward the appearance of agreement. A senior administration official said they are expected to reach the outline of an agreement that would commit Beijing to regulating components of fentanyl, the drug that has driven a devastating opioid epidemic in the United States. But China has made similar commitments before.

They are likely to announce a new forum for a discussion of how to keep artificial intelligence programs away from nuclear command and control — at the same moment the United States is denying China the advanced chips it needs to develop and train A.I. programs. And they will probably discuss resuming military-to-military communications, which China cut off after Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan last year, when she was speaker of the House. But there have been periods of military-to-military contact since the George W. Bush administration.

The interactions between the two leaders when they meet at the lush Filoli estate, a historic house and garden just northwest of the Stanford campus, have been carefully choreographed. Senior Chinese officials have discussed them in meetings with Mr. Biden’s most trusted aides, including Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, and Antony J. Blinken, the secretary of state.

But plenty of thorny issues remain to complicate the discussions, including some Mr. Biden’s aides have said he intends to raise, such as the wars in Ukraine and Gaza and the upcoming election in Taiwan, a self-governing island that China claims as its own.

In briefing after briefing, administration officials have tried to lower expectations about the kind of concrete commitments that used to surround such summits, saying that the mere fact that the leaders of the world’s top two economies, and most potent militaries, are communicating again is itself a sign of progress.