WASHINGTON — Retiring President Biden will meet one last time with Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of this week’s APEC summit in Peru — as President-elect Donald Trump threatens to slap new tariffs on Chinese goods and force the Asian nation to pay “reparations” for the COVID-19 pandemic.
Biden, 81, and Xi, 71, will meet on Saturday in Lima — and administration officials say the US president plans to take a victory lap on a reduction in fentanyl overdose deaths this year after Xi privately agreed to restrict shipments of the lethal opioid last year at another Biden sitdown.
More than 223,000 US residents died from fentanyl and related compounds during Biden’s first three years in office, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates, and Republican politicians slammed Biden early in his term for not doing more to halt the flow.
“We expect the president will use the opportunity to take stock of efforts to responsibly manage competition over the last four years and how the two countries have advanced areas of shared interest,” a US official said.
“These steps are helping us combat the global fentanyl crisis at home and contributed to the decline in overdose deaths and disruption in the supply of illicit fentanyl that we’ve seen over the last year.”
Bide and Xi also are expected to discuss artificial intelligence and global warming — as Trump routinely scoffs at China’s lack of commitment to reducing its own fossil fuels use.
“On AI, the two sides have recognized the novel risks posed … and have begun to have difficult but productive conversations about AI safety and risk,” the US official added.
“On climate, our country’s envoys have also had deep and meaningful discussions over the past four years, leading to three far-ranging joint statements that have set the stage for climate commitments on greenhouse gas reductions, peak emissions and renewable energy.”
Trump has been deeply skeptical of international agreements that commit the US to reducing its use of fuels such as coal, oil and natural gas. During his first term of office, the 45th president withdrew from the Paris Climate Accords, arguing that China wasn’t being held to the same standards.
Biden ultimately kept in place Trump’s first-term tariffs on China and even added some new ones in May as he was seeking re-election, before ultimately dropping out of the campaign two months later.
Trump in 2018 imposed a 25% tariff on steel and 10% tariff on aluminum from most countries, including China. He later imposed tariffs between 7.5% and 25% on Chinese goods comprising $362 billion of annual imports, or more than half of the total.
In May, Biden announced tariffs on roughly $18 billion in annual Chinese imports — including metals such as steel and aluminum and green-energy technologies such as solar panels and electric vehicle, as well as other goods including certain semiconductors, construction cranes and medical products.
Over the next two years under those Biden tariffs, electric vehicles will face a 100% tariff, solar panel parts will be slapped with a 50% import levy and other goods with a 25% penalty.
When Trump retakes power in January, he is expected to take a more direct approach to pressuring China, though he also has spoken of the importance of maintaining a good personal relationship with Xi.
Biden and Xi previously met in Bali, Indonesia, in 2022 and outside San Francisco last year.
Biden didn’t publicly press Xi at either of his previous meetings to curb fentanyl exports, but walked away from the second meeting with an agreement to do so — after Trump also claimed during his term that Xi had agreed to a crackdown, though one did not materialize after the Republican lost to Biden in the 2020 election and US deaths surged as the compound increasingly was cut into non-opioid drugs, killing unwitting Americans.
Biden also did not publicly press Xi to be transparent on the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, which parts of the US government believe began with a lab leak in Wuhan, China, ultimately killing more than 1 million Americans and causing massive social, economic and educational upheaval.
Trump has floated forcing China to pay $50 trillion in “reparations” for the virus and called for a “global summit” on the topic last year.
The president-elect and his congressional allies have regularly accused Biden of being insufficiently tough on China due to the fact that state-owned companies paid millions to first son Hunter Biden and first brother James Biden during and immediately after Joe Biden’s vice presidency.
Joe Biden met with leaders of both major Chinese business ventures involving his relatives — and in an infamous 2017 email, one of Hunter’s associates outlined a 10% cut for the “big guy” in a proposed joint venture.
Trump claimed last year that Biden “was bribed and now he’s being blackmailed” by Beijing, and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) told The Post that Biden was “soft” on China and that “it probably has something to do with business relationships and may very well involve Hunter and James Biden and some of the deals they made over there.”
Biden’s looming meeting with Xi was announced as the outgoing president welcomed Trump to the White House for a conversation on the presidential transition, with the men swapping kind words during a brief press availability in the Oval Office.