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Fresh off a leadership role at the Glasgow Climate Summit (COP26) and the signing of the largest infrastructure package in decades, the emboldened Biden administration turned its attention to Beijing. President Biden initiated a virtual meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping to tackle some of the bigger, still unresolved, issues between the strategic rivals. As United States Studies Centre (USSC) Senior Lecturer Dr Gorana Grgic said on ABC News, President Biden is fulfilling a campaign promise he made to find areas of “cooperation and those other areas of competition where cooperation can’t be achieved” while USSC Senior Fellow Jared Mondschein told Channel 9, “Both sides had some low expectations on this meeting and they met those low expectations.” Yet picking up on the effusive language that characterised the bilateral meeting, USSC Associate Professor David Smith noted, “That ostentatious display of good manners was significant because, most of this year it’s been pretty open hostility between these two countries.”