President Joe Biden will meet with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Chair Xi Jinping this week as 21 Pacific countries and U.S. officials meet in San Francisco, Calif. for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit. Meetings on our soil must be taken on our terms.
The Biden-Xi meeting comes after the Biden administration spent almost two years sending U.S. officials to Beijing for fruitless meetings and engagements—and sidelined Congress in the process.
The meeting also comes after California Governor Gavin Newsom spent a week parading around China on a vanity trip—participating in photo-ops at the Great Wall of China, signing declarations and "Memorandums of Understanding" on climate change with the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases and flouter of international norms, promoting Chinese businesses, and playing basketball. As if it could not have been worse, the governor publicly dismissed raising issues of human rights and the CCP's complicity in the fentanyl crisis during his trip.
Political leaders must take the threat posed by the CCP seriously. The CCP has made very clear its goal is to surpass the U.S. as the world's top economic and military power and rewrite the international rules-based order in its own image.
This is not empty rhetoric—their economic coercion, gross human rights abuses, and military exercises are on full display. When my colleagues and I visited Taiwan in April, we were greeted by three Chinese fighter vessels as we landed. Ten Chinese fighter vessels and 70 airplanes watched our departure from the island two days later. Furthermore, the CCP is stepping up its military aggression against the U.S. and our allies, even going as far as ramming into the coast guard vessels of our Filipino allies.
When President Biden meets with President Xi, he should not sideline our nation's values and priorities like Governor Newsom. The CCP has gotten used to calling the shots, and this must change starting this week.
President Biden should press Chair Xi on CCP exports of chemical precursors fueling our fentanyl crisis, North Korea's growing belligerence in East Asia, human rights abuses against the Chinese people and ethnic minorities, Americans detained in China, theft of intellectual property, military de-escalation in the Indo-Pacific, and Beijing's growing debt diplomacy to increase its influence with developing countries.
Anything less is unacceptable and only emboldens Xi toward continuing along the path of aggression, domination, and destroying the rules-based order that has created peace and prosperity around the world.
The CCP is using American lives as bargaining chips to achieve sanctions relief for its human rights abuses. Reports from earlier this year suggested the Biden administration was considering taking the bait and granting Beijing's request to lift sanctions from human rights abuses just to confirm a meeting to discuss the fentanyl crisis. Ignoring our values on human rights to appease the country that is producing the chemicals that fuel the fentanyl crisis is unacceptable.
President Biden must also make strides to free Americans Mark Swidan, Kai Li, David Lin, and others who are wrongfully detained in China.
Additionally, CCP agents have stolen U.S. intellectual property and continue to do so. This must be raised, and if Beijing remains unwilling to respect intellectual property and change coercive elements of its economy, the U.S. must work with partners and allies to make it more costly for the CCP to disregard the international rules-based trading system. We must secure our supply chains from CCP technologies to protect Americans' data, intellectual property, and our children.
Appeasement must also be a nonstarter. If the CCP were truly interested in de-escalation and managing competition with the U.S., as the Biden administration claims, then they would allow their military to talk to ours. They fly a spy balloon over our air space and collect sensitive information from U.S. military bases. They fly their aircraft dangerously close to ours, and our militaries can't even talk to their counterparts to manage potential crises. This is not how a responsible nation acts.
California has long been known as "the Gateway to the Pacific Rim," and this will come even more to light this week. What happens in the Biden-Xi meeting is crucial for our economy, national security, and way of life, and I will monitor the developments of this meeting closely as chair of the Indo-Pacific Subcommittee. Sidestepping our values and critical interests is not an option.
Congresswoman Young Kim represents California's 40th congressional district and serves as chair of the Subcommittee on the Indo-Pacific. Follow her on X at @RepYoungKim.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
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