Biden, Xi to Meet in Indonesia

President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping will meet in-person in Indonesia Nov. 14 to “discuss a range of regional and global issues,” the White House announced last week. The meeting will take place about a month after the U.S. announced new export licensing requirements designed to restrict China’s ability to acquire advanced computing chips and manufacture advanced semiconductors (see 2210070049).

On a Nov. 10 press call announcing the meeting, a senior administration official stressed that the new export controls are not part of a “containment” strategy toward China but instead stem from concerns that U.S. technology could be used to improve China’s advanced military capabilities. “It's a targeted approach, it is an approach that is specifically driven by the national security and military concerns, and is not something that is more broadly targeted at somehow having a broader impact on China's economy or on the Chinese people,” the official said. “I think that we would just simply reject the characterization that some in Beijing may have been, implying that this is containment.”