President Joe Biden and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, will meet this Wednesday for what could be their most consequential diplomatic rendezvous in many years.

The question—which the meeting won’t decide, but will go a ways toward answering—is whether the United States and China are inevitably cruising toward confrontation, as some military officers have predicted, or whether the two countries can strike some balance between engagement and competition, and, in the process, bring stability to the world.

The two leaders, who will have a one-on-one session during this week’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference in San Francisco, haven’t spoken with, much less seen, each other since a similar get-together at the G20 summit in Bali, Indonesia, exactly one year ago.

Since that earlier summit, a series of incidents and misunderstandings have plunged US-China relations—never quite harmonious—into a state of suspicion and hostility reminiscent of the Cold War. There was the shootdown of a wayward Chinese spy balloon that drifted across America, a string of steadily aggressive military exercises near Taiwan, the ramming of a Philippine boat in the South China Sea—and a series of countermoves by the U.S., Japan, Australia, and the Philippines that showed, depending on one’s outlook, the vitality of America’s alliances or the danger of escalation and war.

Amid all this high drama, Chinese officers cut off their once-routine communications with U.S. military leaders, while Xi stepped up his alliance with Russian President Vladimir Putin and (sort of) voiced support of Hamas in its war with Israel.

Yet in the past few months, a few streaks of sunlight have pierced through the gloom. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo had cordial, productive meetings with their Chinese counterparts; national security adviser Jake Sullivan did the same with foreign minister Yang Wi; Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Xi himself, as did a congressional delegation, to whom the Chinese leader said there were “1,000 reasons to make U.S.-China relations better and no reason to make them worse.”

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