November 18, 2021: -On Tuesday, U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping agreed for a virtual meeting to look into the possibility of arms control talks, U.S. national security advisor Jake Sullivan said.

Biden and Xi have agreed to “look to begin to carry forward the discussion on strategic stability,” Sullivan said about U.S. concerns about China’s nuclear and missile buildup.

“You will see at many levels an intensification of the engagement to ensure that there are guardrails in this competition so that it doesn’t veer off into conflict,” Sullivan said in a Brookings Institution webinar.

Washington has urged China to join it and Russia in a new arms control treaty.

Beijing says the arsenals of the two different countries dwarf its own. It says it is ready to conduct bilateral dialogues on strategic security “based on equality and mutual respect.”

It was the two leaders’ most in-depth exchange since Biden took office in January.

Although they spoke for nearly 3-1/2 hours, the two leaders appeared to do little to narrow differences, raising fears of an eventual conflict between the two superpowers.

The U.S had envisioned the meeting putting stability into a relationship increasingly troubled more than a litany of issues, which include what Washington views as Beijing’s aggressive actions toward Chinese-claimed Taiwan.

Xi told Biden in their meeting that China would take “decisive measures” if Taiwan crossed Beijing’s red line in seeking independence.

Sullivan said that Xi and Biden discussed a broad range of global economic issues, which include how the United States and China can work together to ensure world energy supply and price volatility do not imperil the global economic recovery.

In the meeting, Biden pressed his Chinese counterpart on human rights, and Xi warned that China is responding to provocations on Taiwan.

In a briefing after the meeting that the U.S. aim was not to ease tensions, nor necessarily was that the result, and there were no breakthroughs to report.

China’s state media were citing unnamed Chinese foreign ministry sources as saying the two sides would ease restrictions on access for journalists from different countries.

The China Daily newspaper said that a consensus on journalist visas, among the other points, was reached before the virtual meeting.