November 13 – President Joe Biden is scheduled to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Wednesday during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in San Francisco, California.
This will be the second time the two have met in person since 2021.
While city officials in San Francisco are power-washing the streets and moving the homeless population around, a number of people are wondering if it will really help.
Pat Ryan of NewsTalk 103.7FM pointed out, “This whole thing is theater now. It really is just theater. All this stuff is already pre-scripted and this one especially, the biggest production of all, with Obama pulling the strings of this administration here, not clearly evident on the outside but certainly obvious on the inside here. You can’t help but think that nothing’s going to get really accomplished with those guys meeting face to face.”
Attorney Clint Barkdoll agreed, “I don’t think so either. On the stagecraft on the way to Washington, the Chinese president is going to meet with Gavin Newsom, and he’ll be in San Francisco for a day and you see all the stagecraft in San Francisco. That city has deteriorated to a point that it really is sad. They used to be one of the most beautiful cities in the world. They’ve now deteriorated to the point that nobody wants to live and work or take a tourism trip there. They don’t want this to be seen when the Chinese president visits and I think these visits would be much more realistic if they just let him walk around and see what’s really going on on the city streets in America like in San Francisco.”
President Jinping will eventually travel to Washington.
Barkdoll said, “I think it’s largely going to be theater as well. I mean, yes, they’re going to meet. They’re going to talk about trade, that’s going to be on the agenda. Apparently they’re going to talk about Ukraine and Russia and Israel, but I’m not expecting any big breakthroughs or announcements to come out of this. There will be some major photo ops.”
There will also be a joint press conference.
Barkdoll noted, “I continue to think Biden’s handlers, they all collectively hold their breath during these kinds of events because they know this is when Biden can be very gaffe prone. This will be a high profile meeting this week. So it’ll be interesting to see what happens.”
Michele Jansen of NewsTalk 103.7FM added, “What I find amazing is how many times sas Xi Jinping snubbed the president or very high level people in this Biden administration? There have been a bunch of people going and bowing and scraping to him, it feels like. Janet Yellen and of course the governor of California but then other members of the Biden administration, but there’s multiple times he’s snubbed Biden and snubbed the Pentagon chief. So I feel like if he is finally coming, it’s because he’s getting something he wants.”
Barkdoll predicted, “It’s going to be in the realm of trade. Remember, within the last six weeks, all of these big business moguls from the US met with him in China. Elon Musk was over there. Bill Gates was over there. And of course, China is as much of a problem as they are on the world stage, they’re also the most populated country in the world and these US companies want to continue to sell their products in China. So I imagine trade is going to be a big part of this agenda. I imagine that the White House is getting major pressure from companies like Tesla and Microsoft that they want to make sure that these channels stay open so that those products can keep getting sold in China. So that might be one thing that comes out of it, but I don’t see China giving an inch on some of these other issues, like Ukraine and oil and their support for Russia. It always comes up in these meetings about just their stance on humanitarian initiatives in general. I don’t think you’ll see any movement on any of those things.”
