US President Joe Biden and China’s Xi Jinping meet in Bali on Monday, with Washington hoping to set “guard rails” for relations between the rivals and Beijing in a bid to get ties “back on track”.

The gathering of superpowers on the sidelines of the G20 will be the first in-person meeting of the two since Biden took office and comes with the world’s two largest economies vying for international supremacy.

Xi arrived in Bali on Monday afternoon, on only his second trip abroad since the pandemic, after visiting Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan in September.

The rivalry between the world’s two largest economies has sharply intensified as Beijing has grown more powerful and assertive to replace the US-led order that has prevailed since World War II.

Biden said the meeting should set each country’s “red lines” and that the overall goal will be to establish “guard rails” and “clear rules of the road,” a senior White House official told reporters hours before the summit.

“We’re doing all of this to ensure that competition doesn’t turn into conflict.”

Biden is expected to urge China to rein in ally North Korea after a record-breaking spate of missile tests and fears Pyongyang will soon conduct its seventh nuclear test.

Xi and Biden have spoken via video conference five times since the US leader took office, but the Chinese president’s last in-person US summit was in 2019 with Donald Trump.

Beijing wants Washington to “cooperate with China,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said on Monday.

She called on the United States to “properly contain differences, promote mutually beneficial cooperation, and avoid misunderstandings and miscalculations in order to put US-China relations back on the path of healthy and stable development.” .

Xi arrives buoyed by having secured a landmark third term that cements him as the most powerful Chinese leader in generations.

Biden, meanwhile, was bolstered by his Democratic Party’s better-than-expected midterm election performance.

He will not be the only leader meeting with Xi. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is scheduled to hold talks on Tuesday in what will be the first formal meeting between the two countries’ leaders since 2017.

“There are no preconditions for this discussion. I look forward to a constructive dialogue,” Albanese told reporters on his arrival in Bali on Monday.

The G20 summit opens on Tuesday and comes as rising food and fuel prices around the world, a conflict in Ukraine and the renewed threat of nuclear war casting a looming shadow.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is staying away, sending veteran Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov instead.

Officially, neither the war in Ukraine nor Putin’s dark threats to use nuclear weapons are on the agenda for the summit, but the conflict will dominate discussions.

Soaring energy and food prices have hit richer and poorer G20 members alike – and both are directly fueled by Putin’s war.

On Monday, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said an end to the conflict was “a moral imperative and the best thing we can do for the global economy.”

Russia will also be under pressure to extend a deal allowing Ukrainian grain shipments through the Black Sea when the deal expires on November 19.

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak will push for a renewal of the deal and “call for a G20-wide commitment never to weaponize food production and distribution,” Downing Street said.

Biden and his allies would also like the G20 to at least make it clear to Putin that nuclear war is unacceptable.

But even a clear statement from the group on the matter is likely to be blocked by a mixture of Russian opposition and Chinese unwillingness to break ranks with its ally in Moscow or win Washington a victory.

The G20 has always been more comfortable discussing finance and economics than security, and Moscow wants it to stay that way.

“We categorically reject the politicization of the G20,” Russia’s foreign ministry said on Sunday, offering a taste of what leaders might hear from the notoriously indomitable Lavrov.

The G20 ministerial meetings leading up to the summit failed to agree on a final joint communiqué, and Indonesian officials said on Monday it remains an “work in progress” and a “principal objective” for the summit.

“Honestly, I think the global situation has never been so complex,” Indonesian Government Minister Luhut Binsar Pandjaitan said on Sunday.

“If the leaders (of the G20) don’t come out with a communiqué at the end, that’s fine.”