Biden went along. “You and I have spent a substantial amount of time together, and that’s fairly rare in modern diplomacy,” he told Xi in Los Angeles a few days later. Biden, by his own estimate, had spent some twenty hours in the previous six months conversing with Xi directly—both in the United States that February and in Beijing and Chengdu the summer before. Those long, private, frank conversations, Biden would say, were the highlight of his trip.
