APEC Summit: US grants Chinese journalists hundreds of visas to cover Xi-Biden meeting

In a sign of warming relations, the US has allowed a significant number of Chinese journalists to enter the country to cover the first meeting between President Xi Jinping and President Joe Biden in a year. According to a Bloomberg report, citing an anonymous source involved in the summit preparations this week, the US has granted “hundreds” of visas to Chinese journalists so they can cover the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in San Francisco, where the talks are scheduled to take place. Since 2020, the issue of journalist visas has been a source of tension in China-US ties when both nations expelled reporters and those that remained were often placed on rolling, short-term permits. In 2021, the nations eased the restrictions for reporters they permanently host, handing out one-year multiple entry visas. Still, China and the US limit the number of visas they give to reporters from the other country. Xi is trying to present himself “as a global leader on par with the president of the US,” Bloomberg quoted Oriana Skylar Mastro, who researches China’s military as a center fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, as saying. The Xi-Biden meeting will be the first time the two leaders have spoken since the Group of 20 summit in Bali, Indonesia, in November last year. The US has made resuming high-level military links between the nations a priority of the Xi-Biden sitdown. Beijing cut that communication after then Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan in 2022. A string of tense military encounters in the South China Sea has raised the risk of an accident leading to a wider conflict. Washington and Beijing are also set to reach an agreement for China to crack down on the manufacture and export of fentanyl, according to people familiar with the matter, in return for lifting restrictions on China’s forensic police institute. With inputs from agencies