President Biden's work at the G-20 meeting in Bali, Indonesia continued Tuesday. While his meeting with Xi Jinping has gotten a lot of attention, there will be a different tone to other meetings going on at the gathering.
There’s a protocol to international leaders’ meetings.
There are the large group sessions — for the G-20, topics include food and energy security, digital transformation and health.
Lunches and dinners are generally more informal.
There are meetings of smaller groups — for example, the leaders of the United States, Japan and South Korea have agreed to share information about North Korean missile tests in real-time.
That came out of an in-person meeting Sunday at the summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in Cambodia.
And there are bilateral leaders’ meetings. Generally, stories talk about these happening “on the sidelines” of the big events.
But those small meetings are one of the main points of the larger gatherings — whether it’s the ASEAN meeting, the G-20 summit, or the APEC leaders’ meeting later this week in Bangkok.
For Chinese President Xi Jinping, it’s not just the talks with President Biden.
Other bilateral meetings at G-20 include those with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.
Specific goals are often modest — Albanese said just holding the meeting with Xi on Tuesday will be a success.
He told reporters “for six years, we have not had any dialogue, and it is not in Australia’s interest to not have dialogue with our major trading partner.”
