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Print Edition> World
UPDATED: November 25, 2013 NO. 48 NOVEMBER 28, 2013
Biden Pivots East
U.S. Vice President Joe Biden's scheduled visit will address bilateral ties and U.S. strategic adjustment in the Asia-Pacific
By An Gang
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CONTACT WITH THE NEW GENERATION: U.S. Vice President Joe Biden and then Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping with basketball players in a local high school when visiting post-earthquake reconstruction project in Dujiangyan in southwest China's Sichuan Province on August 21, 2011 (HUANG JINGWEN)

U.S. Vice President Joe Biden has been scheduled to visit China in early December, followed by a trip to Japan and South Korea—both of which are U.S. allies in East Asia.

This will be Biden's second visit to China as vice president. In his previous carefully planned visit in August 2011, he and then Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping, who has been Chinese president since March, spoke for over 10 hours on various topics including strategy, the economy, military, arts and culture, and sensitive international issues. The talks established good personal relations. Xi carried out a successful U.S. visit six months later, bringing U.S.-China ties to a new high.

Biden's scheduled visit will no longer require initial introductions with China's new leaders, allowing the two sides to skip the routine ceremonial gestures and formulaic speeches, and directly conduct thorough discussions on major substantive issues. Frankness and deep communication will be the key methods that the two major powers should take and display to the world.

Biden's mission

Biden's visit will very likely be the last high-level exchange between Beijing and Washington in 2013. Beijing is expected to reaffirm President Xi Jinping and his U.S. counterpart Barack Obama's strategic common understanding they reached in their meeting in California in June—sustaining and implementing the trend of building a new pattern of relations between the two powers.

The new Chinese Government pays more attention to active planning and management of diplomacy, stressing top-line design and bottom-line thinking. China hopes to avoid the "historic destiny" of confrontation between an existing superpower and an emerging power, and more importantly, to fix bilateral relations on the healthy track of stable development and constructive cooperation.

China considers Biden as the one with whom it can reliably make contact, as he represents the "rational ones" in Washington. Biden first landed in China in 1979 as a member of a U.S. Congress delegation, during which he met former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, who was regarded as the chief architect of reform and opening up since the late 1970s. Biden has highly praised China's reform and opening up. In his China visit in 2011, he declared in a speech in Sichuan Province, Deng's hometown, that he has insisted since 30 years ago that China's rise not only is significant to the Chinese people, but also meets with the interests of the United States and even the whole world.

Sharing responsibilities with Obama, Biden's role as vice president has most closely involved the China-U.S. relationship. He participated in and delivered speeches on behalf of Obama at the opening ceremonies of the China-U.S. Strategic and Economic Dialogue held in Washington, D.C. on three consecutive occasions. He expressed that President Obama and he were both highly aware that China-U.S. relations will be a key point, and that bilateral cooperation would decide to a large extent how the world copes with challenges in the 21st century. Coordination among the White House, U.S. Department of State and the military is clearly improved in Obama's second term. Furthermore, it is believed that Biden is likely to represent the Democratic Party in the next presidential election, if Hillary Clinton chooses not to run in 2016.

Compared with his first China visit as vice president, Biden's second one will occur under new circumstances. The two governments have jointly confirmed the direction to stably develop China-U.S. relations and build the new pattern of relationship between great powers. But this task comes with more complicated challenges for both sides.

As his visit comes shortly after the Third Plenary Session of the 18th Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, Biden will conduct an exploring voyage of China's new round of reform. The economy undoubtedly will be an important topic. Face-to-face communication between the two sides will help Washington correctly understand Beijing's development direction of reform. China hopes that the two sides can make joint efforts, seize opportunity from the new reform and the United States' structural adjustment, improve coordination of macro-economic policies, plot out a roadmap of reciprocal cooperation in the new era, and work to solve problems that have long been troubling bilateral trade and economic relations.

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