Joe Biden, sitting next to Xi Jinping during one of their marathon sessions in 2011, hailed the direction of US-China relations.

“The development of the relationship is consistently positive,” Biden told businesspeople visiting the two vice presidents at a Beijing hotel, expressing “great optimism for the next 30 years.”

As the two leaders, now presidents, prepare to meet again after just over a decade into this timeframe, the trajectory of the relationship is far from positive — and virtually no US politician is optimistic about it Xi, China’s most powerful leader in decades, has just secured a historic third term.

Biden and Xi are set to hold talks Monday on the sidelines of a G20 summit in Bali at a time of rising US alertness. Xi’s China has become, in the words of Foreign Minister Antony Blinken, “more repressive at home” and “more aggressive abroad” – with the once largely theoretical threat of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan increasingly being viewed as real.

It will be the first face-to-face meeting between the US and Chinese presidents since Donald Trump spoke in 2019 with Xi, who only recently resumed international travel in the wake of the pandemic.

But Biden and Xi know each other unusually well for two world leaders. They have spoken by phone or video conference five times since the Democrat moved into the White House in 2021.

And the relationship goes much deeper.

With Xi leading the wait, Biden flew to China in 2011 and later invited him to tour the United States, including rural Iowa, where a young Xi had gone on an exchange.

Biden said that as vice president he spent 67 hours face-to-face with Xi, part of the then-Barack Obama administration’s effort to at least understand, if not bring, the rising Chinese leader to justice.

US officials and pundits, meanwhile, have come to believe that the 69-year-old Xi has no desire for moderation as the new Chinese Communist Party Central Committee is riddled with hardliners and has no apparent heir.

“We all knew that Xi Jinping would prevail. But I think people are still surprised that Xi Jinping couldn’t even find the grace to salvage housing for his political opponents,” said Yun Sun, senior fellow at the Stimson Center in Washington.

With the end of the party congress, Xi now has more space and flexibility to focus on his international push for a stronger China, she said.

“We are not dealing with a Xi Jinping who will be less emboldened,” she said.

Both Biden and Trump have identified China as the United States’ preeminent global competitor. But while Trump late in his tenure railed against China on everything from trade to Covid-19, Biden has backed talks on narrow areas of cooperation.

Biden told reporters Wednesday he would speak to Xi about each country’s “red lines” in hopes of avoiding conflict.

Chief among the red lines for China is Taiwan, the self-governing democracy that Beijing claims as its own, with Beijing conducting drills seen as a dry run for an invasion to counter House Speaker Nancy Pelosis’ visit in August protest.

Biden has said three times that the United States would defend Taiwan militarily if China attacks, though the White House has rolled back the apparent shift from longstanding US ambiguity.

Privately, some US allies have hailed the more forceful approach towards Beijing, including in the South China Sea, where Washington has swung from neutrality to defending the myriad claims of Southeast Asian nations.

“There is a widespread feeling that the United States has finally understood the nature of the threat,” said a senior Washington-based diplomat from an Asian country friendly to the United States.

The United States has also taken first steps with allies on a once unthinkable idea – reducing the two decades of economic dependency on China, which is advancing under Xi to dominate next-generation technology, and where Covid lockdowns are increasing the fragility of supply chains have uncovered.

“Seeing what the US is doing to de facto decouple or separate, at least in technology, could change the calculations of other Asian countries,” said Matt Goodman, senior vice president of economics at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Biden has expressed hope to work with China, the world’s biggest emitter of carbon, on climate change, and officials said Saturday Biden would push Xi on North Korea, a Chinese ally that has been firing a barrage of missiles in recent weeks.

Yun doubted China would comply, saying Xi viewed the cooperation as a transaction.

“If competition is the main issue of US-China policy, why should China cooperate?” she said.

“Their calculation is that they will not do anything from the heart. They want to see the US give something.”