AILSA CHANG, HOST:

President Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping will be speaking on the phone soon, probably their last phone conversation before the U.S. election. That’s one of the outcomes of a rare trip to Beijing by national security adviser Jake Sullivan that wrapped up today. Sullivan and his Chinese counterparts covered a lot of ground over many hours, and NPR’s John Ruwitch has been following it all. Hi, John.

JOHN RUWITCH, BYLINE: Hey, Ailsa.

CHANG: Hey. OK, so this was Sullivan’s first trip to China as Biden’s national security adviser, right? Like, why now – this trip?

RUWITCH: Yeah. As you know, relations have been rocky. They sort of hit bottom, arguably, last year – early last year with that spy balloon incident. And since then…

CHANG: Right.

RUWITCH: …Both sides have really been trying to put things on more stable ground. And one of the main channels of that have been this conversation – series of conversations between Jake Sullivan and Wang Yi, who’s the Chinese Communist Party’s top foreign policy official. They’ve met five times since the balloon incident, including once in Washington. So this was, in some ways, a reciprocal visit, with time running out as the Biden administration, you know, approaches its end. Sullivan said he had 14 hours of meetings in Beijing.

CHANG: Wow.

RUWITCH: And speaking to the media afterwards, he repeated sort of the Biden administration’s mantra about relations with China. They want to manage the relationship so competition doesn’t veer into conflict.

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JAKE SULLIVAN: That is ongoing work. And being able to reach the end of President Biden’s administration with the relationship on a stable basis, even though we have areas of difference and areas of difficulty, this is something we will work towards.

CHANG: OK. And I guess that ongoing work includes another phone call between the two presidents in the coming weeks. What else came out of the meeting?

RUWITCH: Well, Sullivan met not only with Wang Yi; but he sat down with Zhang Youxia, who’s a vice chairman of China’s Central Military Commission – basically top brass – and the People’s Liberation Army. They agreed to a discussion soon between military theater commanders in the Pacific, which is a big step. Sullivan also met with Xi Jinping while he was in Beijing. And according to China’s foreign ministry, Xi really tried to drive home the point that cooperation was the right path for China-U.S. relations, that the two countries should coexist peacefully. He said China’s policy towards the U.S. has been stable and indicated that he expects the same in return.

CHANG: I mean, that’s interesting, especially given that, you know, we have this U.S. election coming up, a new administration in a few months. Did that factor into these discussions, you think?

RUWITCH: You know, Sullivan said the election wasn’t really discussed, and he did not get a feel for how China’s leadership is thinking about the race. But he noted that he did raise the issue of election interference, which he said he does every time he meets Chinese officials to sort of lay down a marker. And afterward, he was asked about what kind of questions the Chinese leaders raised about China policy in a potential Harris administration. Sullivan said Harris has been a central member of the Biden administration’s foreign policy team and helped plan and execute policy for the Indo-Pacific.

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SULLIVAN: So I was able to share my experience and my perspective of working closely with the vice president and the role that she has played over the course of the past four years.

RUWITCH: So to some extent, he does appear to have telegraphed to the Chinese leadership that he thinks U.S. policy toward China, if Harris is elected, will be pretty consistent. That’s a big if, though – right? – because the race here is pretty tight.

CHANG: Pretty tight, indeed. No doubt Beijing has been watching this all very closely. What do we know about their take on all of this?

RUWITCH: Well, in public, you know, officials there are very restrained. They don’t really comment openly on the U.S. election, except to say they don’t want China to be cast as a bad guy during the campaigning. Beijing is realistic about the fact that this great power competition with the U.S. is here to stay and will continue under Trump and Harris. For China, the difference that they see really is in style rather than substance.

CHANG: That is NPR’s John Ruwitch. Thank you so much, John.

RUWITCH: You’re welcome.

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