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Version 2 Version 3
Biden Arrives in China, Seeking Restraint Over New Air Zone As Biden Visits, Chinese Push Back Over Air Zone
(about 3 hours later)
BEIJING — Shuttling from one feuding neighbor to the other, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. arrived here from Tokyo on Wednesday to appeal to China’s leaders to show restraint in policing a new air defense zone in the East China Sea that has ignited tensions with Japan. BEIJING — Chinese leaders pushed back at visiting Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Wednesday over what they assert is their right to control a wide swath of airspace in the bitterly contested East China Sea. But the Chinese also indicated they had not decided how aggressively to enforce their so-called air defense identification zone, which has ignited tensions with Japan.
After a meeting with President Xi Jinping that was scheduled for 45 minutes but lasted two hours, a solemn, weary-sounding Mr. Biden made no mention of the dispute, but said the relationship between the United States and China “ultimately has to be based on trust, and a positive notion about the motive of one another.” Shuttling from one feuding neighbor to the other, Mr. Biden arrived here from Tokyo to urge China’s president, Xi Jinping, to show restraint in the restricted zone, which Mr. Biden said the United States regarded as illegitimate and a provocation.
Mr. Xi, who cultivated unusually personal ties to Mr. Biden when he was China’s vice president, sounded a more upbeat note about the broader relationship, though he conceded that “regional hot-spot issues keep cropping up.” The United States and China, he said, need to “appropriately handle sensitive issues and differences between us.” After 5½ hours of meetings, in which Mr. Biden laid out the American case against China’s action and Mr. Xi made a forceful counterargument, senior administration officials said, “President Xi took on board what the vice president said. It’s up to China, and we’ll see how things will unfold in the coming days and weeks.”
From the scripted diplomatic language, it was difficult to tell whether Mr. Biden’s meeting had reduced tensions over the new air defense zone, which the vice president said a day earlier in Tokyo was an effort to “unilaterally change the status quo in the East China Sea” and raised “the risk of accidents and miscalculation.” Mr. Xi’s response suggested China and Japan may be able to manage a standoff that had threatened to escalate dangerously, with China scrambling fighter jets to intercept Japanese airliners flying off the Chinese coast.
Hours after Mr. Biden arrived, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said the new air defense zone was a fact of life that the world needed to accept. The spokesman at the ministry, Hong Lei, described it as a “zone of cooperation, and not confrontation.” In brief public remarks midway through the meetings, Mr. Biden made no reference to the dispute, but said the relationship between the United States and China “ultimately has to be based on trust, and a positive notion about the motive of one another.”
Since the zone was announced on Nov. 23, 55 airlines from 19 countries have provided China with flight information, the spokesman said. The Federal Aviation Administration has advised American carriers to comply with China’s request when flying into the airspace, though the United States does not recognize its legitimacy. Mr. Xi, who cultivated unusually personal ties to Mr. Biden when he was China’s vice president, sounded a more upbeat note about the broader relationship, though he conceded “regional hot-spot issues keep cropping up.”
In Tokyo, Mr. Biden stopped short of calling on China to rescind the zone, something it is highly unlikely to do, given the nationalist sentiments that have been aroused by its standoff with Japan. But the United States has refused to recognize the zone, dispatching B-52 bombers last week to fly through the contested airspace. He welcomed Mr. Biden as “my old friend” and said nothing directly about the air defense zone.
The vice president’s goal appears to be to neutralize the destabilizing impact of the air defense zone in the region by persuading the Chinese authorities to stop scrambling fighter jets or otherwise disrupt the busy air corridors between Japan and China. For Mr. Biden, however, China’s sudden action last month upended what was meant to be tour of Asia with a wide-ranging agenda. Instead, he has had to walk a fine line: defending an ally and rebuking a potential adversary, while preventing a spat over a clump of islands in the East China Sea from mushrooming into a wider conflict.
China also seemed eager to defuse tensions. On the eve of Mr. Biden’s visit, the Defense Ministry issued an unusual clarification, saying the zone “will not affect the freedom of overflight, based on international laws, of other countries’ aircraft.” A day earlier in Tokyo, Mr. Biden condemned China’s action as an effort to “unilaterally change the status quo” and said it had raised “the risk of accidents and miscalculation.” He promised to raise those objections with Mr. Xi in Beijing.
The statement said the Chinese military was “fully capable” of exercising control over the zone, a wide swath of the East China Sea, but it added that such deterrence would not always be needed. “Fighter planes are unnecessary,” it said, “when an entering aircraft is found to pose no threat to us, but necessary surveillance is needed.” Mr. Biden stopped short of calling on China to rescind the zone, something it is highly unlikely to do, given the nationalist sentiments that have been animated by its standoff with Japan. The United States military has ignored the zone, dispatching B-52 bombers last week to fly through it.
In Tokyo, Mr. Biden said China and Japan needed “crisis management mechanisms and effective channels of communication” to avoid the risk of miscalculation. The countries have discussed a hotline, but the talks have gone nowhere. Shortly after Mr. Biden arrived, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said the new air defense identification zone was a fact of life that the world needed to accept.
“The only conflict that is worse than one that is intended is one that is unintended,” the vice president said as Prime Minister Shinzo Abe stood next to him. The spokesman at the ministry, Hong Lei, described it as a “zone of cooperation, and not confrontation.”
The Japanese government has called for China to roll back the zone. But Mr. Abe, perhaps seeking to project unity with Mr. Biden, did not repeat that demand on Tuesday. Since the zone was announced on Nov. 23, 55 airlines from 19 countries had provided China with flight information, he said. The Federal Aviation Administration has advised civilian aircraft to comply with China’s request when flying into the airspace.
He said the United States and Japan had reaffirmed that they would not alter any joint military operations in the area. “We will not condone any action that will threaten the safety of civilian aircraft,” he added. The F.A.A.'s guidance, which officials said was routine, unsettled Japanese officials, who had instructed their carriers not to identify themselves to the Chinese. But Mr. Biden’s strong words, combined with his appeal to China’s top leader, appears to have smoothed over that flap.
That appeared to be an attempt to smooth over a disconnect between the United States and Japan over the F.A.A.'s guidance to American carriers that they identify themselves before entering the restricted zone. Officials in Tokyo have instructed Japanese carriers to ignore the Chinese demand. “The vice president seems to have put them back on track,” said Michael J. Green, an adviser on Asia in the George W. Bush administration. “Beijing may not like, and he probably did not want his trip to be all about this, but he had to send a strong message of dissuasion.”
Obama administration officials insisted that there was no discord between the United States and Japan on how to respond to the Chinese zone. The aviation administration, they said, routinely gives guidance whenever a country issues a warning to ships and planes. Mr. Xi’s sanguine words were calculated to send a different message, according to China experts.
“Nothing that the F.A.A. has done constitutes any acceptance or recognition of this,” said a senior administration official traveling with Mr. Biden. “The U.S. has clearly set forth that our military aircraft will continue to operate normally.” “A reason for Xi’s tone is a desire to make U.S. allies, especially Japan, uneasy about U.S. support by suggesting subliminally that the U.S.-China relationship is more important than other relationships, and the U.S. is keeping it sound despite China-Japan relations,” said Jeffrey A. Bader, a former China adviser to President Obama.
The Japanese government perceives the zone as an attempt by the Chinese to assert control over disputed islands, known in Japan as the Senkaku and in China as the Diaoyu. Japan has a long-established air defense identification zone that covers much of the East China Sea, including those islands. Mr. Xi, repeating a phrase he used at a meeting with Mr. Obama in Southern California last June, said China wanted to build a “new model of major-country relations,” based on respecting each other’s core interests, collaborating on global problems, and devising ways to “appropriately handle sensitive issues and differences between us.”
Pointedly taking note of that, the Chinese Defense Ministry statement said Japan’s actions, including “playing up the so-called China threat” and threatening to shoot down Chinese drones, had forced China to make “necessary reactions.” Mr. Biden, while embracing that formulation, said the relationship between China and the United States needed candor and trust. He said Mr. Xi had been candid in their previous meetings, and Mr. Biden’s aides said their exchanges were similarly uninhibited on Wednesday, ranging widely to include history and politics.
Some analysts said they believed that the Chinese government was caught off guard by the ferocity of the opposition from the United States, the European Union and Australia, on top of a predictably angry response by Japan and South Korea. Another major area of focus, American officials said, was North Korea, which has entered another period of uncertainty with reports that a powerful uncle of the country’s supreme leader, Kim Jong-un, had been purged from his positions. Officials declined to say whether China had intelligence on the ouster of the uncle, Jang Song Thaek.
For Mr. Biden, it has been a distraction on a trip he had hoped would promote other issues, like a trans-Pacific trade agreement and efforts to curb the nuclear threat in North Korea. But they said Mr. Xi displayed renewed interest in pursuing a dual-track strategy of economic pressure and diplomacy to curb North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, prompted in part by the negotiations that recently led to an interim nuclear deal with Iran.
Before his meetings at the Great Hall of the People, Mr. Biden dropped in on the consular section of the American Embassy to promote its efforts to streamline the issuing of visas, particularly to students seeking to study in the United States. He also delivered a pitch to a long line of people, many of them teenagers, waiting to submit applications “They talked at some length about what the Iran example means for North Korea,” said a senior official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the contents of the meeting.
Mr. Biden, officials said, also quizzed Mr. Xi about the recent Communist Party Congress, which ratified far-reaching economic reforms, among them the liberalization of interest rates. The vice president, they said, pressed Mr. Xi to implement some reforms as quickly as possible, given that his most ambitious ideas will take years to put in place.
Before his meeting with Mr. Xi, Mr. Biden dropped in on the consular section of the American Embassy to promote its efforts to streamline the issuing of visas, particularly to students seeking to study in the United States. While there, he delivered a pitch to a line of people, many of them teenagers, waiting to submit applications.
“We’re constantly looking for bright, intelligent, innovative young people to come to America and stay in America,” Mr. Biden said. “I hope you learn that innovation can only occur where you can breathe free, challenge the government, challenge religious leaders.”“We’re constantly looking for bright, intelligent, innovative young people to come to America and stay in America,” Mr. Biden said. “I hope you learn that innovation can only occur where you can breathe free, challenge the government, challenge religious leaders.”
Mr. Biden’s audience applauded respectfully, though his words were less relevant to them, since the embassy in Beijing processes visas only for temporary stays in the United States, not immigrant visas. Mr. Biden’s audience applauded respectfully, though his words were less relevant to them, since the embassy only processes visas for temporary stays in the United States, not immigrant visas.

Jane Perlez contributed reporting.

Jane Perlez contributed reporting.