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At least 20 times since taking office, Biden has publicly spoken about his close bond with Xi, forged when they were both vice presidents. The version Biden told at a Maryland fundraiser in June included the claim he had spent 85 hours alone with Xi and that they had traveled some 17,000 miles together. Biden recalled one of their trips that captured the specialness of their connection.

“And we were on the Tibetan plateau on one of our meetings, and he looked at me and he said, ‘Can you define America for me?’ And I said, ‘Yes, I can, in one word: possibilities,’” Biden said.

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The numbers vary in each telling, but various fact-checkers have pointed out that Biden has spent only a handful of hours with Xi and traveled with him no more than about 1,000 miles. And the pair’s visit to rural China in 2011 was not, in fact, on the Tibetan plateau. This is not to criticize Biden’s memory. The point is that Biden’s rosy view of this friendship might not be grounded in reality.

There is strong evidence that Xi isn’t as sanguine about the two men’s relationship. Take, for example, this recent New York Times review of Xi’s overlooked speeches to the Chinese military and top Chinese Communist Party officials from 2012 to 2016 — the exact time period Biden remembers so fondly.

In them, Xi reveals his true feelings about the U.S-China relationship, which included “an almost fatalistic conviction” that U.S.-China relations were destined to worsen. Xi also told his own officials the exact opposite of what he told President Barack Obama during their 2015 summit at which he promised that China would not militarize the South China Sea.

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Holding out smooth relations in exchange for a more passive U.S. approach is Xi’s go-to move. Like Obama and Biden, President Donald Trump also thought he had a genuine and close friendship with Xi. “We love each other,” Trump said of the bromance early in 2020. Later, Trump blamed the downturn in their relationship on the outbreak of the covid-19 pandemic.

To be fair, the basic rationale for holding the Biden-Xi meeting is sound. The two most powerful countries should be on speaking terms, especially with so many world crises ongoing. Biden administration officials assure me that the whole team — including the president — are going into Wednesday’s four-hour meeting with a healthy skepticism of any of any promises made by Xi.

“We’ve all collectively learned our lesson,” Rahm Emanuel, the U.S. ambassador to Japan, told me. “Given where the relationship has been, you start with the basic premise that you are going to have a serious conversation. And we are going to do this as a confidence building measure, without any........

© Washington Post