Biden-Xi phone call sparks clash on U.S. high tech export controls

President Joe Biden and China's leader Xi Jinping faced off in on a phone call on Tuesday about U.S. efforts to restrict high technology exports to China.

According to a White House readout of the call, Biden told Xi that restrictions are necessary "to prevent advanced U.S. technologies from being used to undermine our national security, without unduly limiting trade and investment." Xi, in turn, argued to Biden that those export curbs "suppress China’s trade and technology development" and are "creating risks" for bilateral ties, said a Chinese Foreign Ministry statement summarizing Xi's comments released after the call. The statement said that Xi warned that Beijing won't "sit back and watch" if the U.S. continues to impose such restrictions.

It was the sixth call between the two leaders since Biden took office, and their first direct contact following their summit in San Francisco last November. The call also included discussion of military-to-military communications, upcoming talks on AI, cooperation on counternarcotics and climate change and people-to-people exchange, said the White House statement.

Biden's agenda for the call also included warning Xi against interfering in the November U.S. presidential election, a senior administration official told reporters before their talks. Biden wanted to hammer home to Xi “our concern that any country interferes or influences our elections,” the senior official said. Suspicions of potential Chinese interference run high. “I don't think we ever really take the Chinese at their word when they say they will or will not do something — it is about verifying,” the official said on Monday before the call, disclosing what the president planned to say. The White House post-call readout made no mention of election interference.

The Biden-Xi call kicks off a new round of high-level bilateral diplomatic engagement. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s second trip to Beijing starts on Thursday and Secretary of State Antony Blinken — who last visited China in June — will make a return trip “in the coming weeks,” the official said. Blinken's trip will occur "in the near future," said the Chinese Foreign Ministry statement. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin will have a call with his Chinese counterpart "soon" and the bilateral Maritime Military Consultative Agreement talks — suspended since 2022 — will resume in Honolulu this week, the official said.

Washington and Beijing are also finalizing plans for a bilateral dialogue in the coming weeks “aimed at managing the risk and safety challenges posed by advanced forms of AI,” the official said.

The administration provided the briefing to reporters ahead of the call with the condition that the official would be granted anonymity.

That outreach reflects the administration’s focus on sustaining a still-fragile stability in bilateral ties battered over the past year by issues including the Chinese spy balloon incident, rising tensions across the Taiwan Strait and Beijing’s increasingly aggressive posture in the South China Sea. The administration has tried to cool that rancor in the past nine months with a series of visits by senior administration officials aimed to steady ties ahead of a U.S. presidential election campaign in which worries about threats to U.S. national security from China will likely loom.

The Biden administration considers calls like the one Tuesday as critical to those efforts. Both leaders agreed at their November summit “that they would try to pick up the phones a bit more … being in closer touch at the leader level, which is so very critical in the Chinese system,” the official said.

Another key issue on Biden’s call agenda was cyberattacks by China-linked hackers. The U.S. and allies including Canada and Australia issued a joint warning in February that the Chinese state-sponsored hacking crew Volt Typhoon has launched attacks on U.S. communications, water and transportation infrastructure. “We've been clear both publicly and privately that we will take actions to address threats to our national security for malicious cyber activity,” the official said prior to the call.

China has regularly denied any state-sponsored hacking.

Biden also reiterated the U.S. position for "peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait," his support for "freedom of navigation" in the South China Sea and his concerns about Beijing's "support for Russia’s defense industrial base," the White House statement said.

There will likely be subsequent Biden-Xi calls in the coming months and the possibility of a face-to-face meeting — their third summit — by the end of 2024. “Depending on what happens in the coming year, we would hope there would be a chance for another in-person meeting but don't have anything even to speculate on when that might be,” the official said.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story misstated the nature of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin's upcoming contact with his Chinese counterpart.