Hey NPR Politics Podcast. This is Sophia calling from Oakland, California, where my application to be an associate social worker has just been approved after two months of waiting.

This podcast was recorded at 149 p.m. on Tuesday the 16th of November.

Things may have changed by the time you hear it, but I'll still be grateful that I can start putting my degree to use and seeing clients for therapy. Enjoy the show.

Congratulations. That's awesome. Yeah, and I think her services are needed now more than ever. So thank you for jumping into the fold, Sophia.

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Franco Adonia's. I also cover the White House.

And NPR's John Ruich is here. He covers China for NPR. Hello, John. Hey, guys.

So I guess people might have figured out why we have you both here, but overnight there was a virtual US China summit between President Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

And we're going to break down what happened as much as we know. But first let's start with the context because things have been, I don't know, how should we describe it?

A bit tense between the United States and China. What have been the main points of contention, Franco, from the US perspective?

You know, I mean, Biden's concerns. He's got quite a few. I mean, there's concerns about human rights abuses. I mean, a big part of that is abuses against the weaker minority in Xinjiang, China.

And President Biden has also spoken out against the crackdown in Hong Kong. The United States has a lot of concerns about economic practices that China is doing.

That's something that Biden said is not only impacting the United States, but also the global economy. He argues that they need to all be on the same economic playing field.

The United States is also very concerned about perceived threats to Taiwan as well as militarization of the South China Sea.

And there are so many other concerns, strategic issues like nuclear weapons, as well as China's increased use of cyber.

So, John, heading into this meeting, where was China? How did they see these various issues? Or did they have other issues with the US?

China, so going into this meeting to be totally honest, up above all of this was a searing disappointment on China's part in the Biden administration.

They thought all this kind of stuff, this tension, over trade, over cyber, over all these things was going to end, or at least be dialed back down to sort of a normal level dialed from 11 down to three or whatever you want to say.

Turn it up to 11. Exactly. Once the Trump administration was out of office, and that obviously didn't happen.

So, one of their sort of overriding priorities, and one thing they've been pushing is really to try to get things back to some semblance of stable and normal.

On all those issues, you know, all those issues came up, right, or many of them did.

And China's sort of take on all of it is, hey, let's just talk, right? As long as we have dialogue going, there's nothing we can't work through. We can manage our differences without letting them derail the relationship.

I guess if you kind of dig down a little bit though on some of these issues, their position's pretty firm. You know, take human rights, for example.

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