ABOARD AIR FORCE ONE – U.S. President Joe Biden may talk with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping in the coming weeks, national security adviser Jake Sullivan said aboard Air Force One on Thursday.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if, in the coming weeks, President Biden and President Xi speak again,” he said.
Sullivan spoke on Wednesday with Yang Jiechi, a key foreign policy adviser to Xi, and said he was “direct with him about our concerns about North Korea’s nuclear and missile activities and our view that this is not in China’s interests.”
“It’s not in America’s interests, and that China should contemplate taking whatever steps it can to reduce the possibility of a provocative North Korean act, … we had a good back and forth on that subject,” he said, adding that Taiwan and other issues were also discussed.
Biden lands in South Korea on Friday evening, where he meets new President Yoon Suk-yeol with North Korea at the top of the agenda.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un abandoned a freeze on intercontinental ballistic missile testing and appears poised to resume testing of nuclear bombs, perhaps while Biden is in the region.
(Reporting by Trevor Hunnicutt; writing by Kanishka Singh and Costas Pitas; Editing by Caitlin Webber and Leslie Adler)
