US President Joe Biden and China's Xi Jinping will talk Monday at a virtual summit aimed at calming tensions over Taiwan and other flashpoints, but with both sides signaling little appetite for significant compromise.

The two leaders have spoken by phone twice since Biden's inauguration in January but with Xi refusing to travel abroad because of the pandemic, an online video meeting was the only option short of an in-person summit.

White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki said Biden was going into the summit, expected to last a couple hours, "from a position of strength," after months of rebuilding alliances with other democracies to contain China.

The meeting is "an opportunity to set the terms of the competition with China" and to insist the leadership in Beijing "play by the rules of the road," Psaki said.

Most of the attention in the build-up to the meeting has focused on the sparring over Taiwan, a self-ruling democracy claimed by China. Biden's aides have cast the summit as an opportunity to help prevent tensions from escalating.

Biden will "make clear that we want to build common guardrails to avoid miscalculation," a senior US administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told reporters.

However, the White House sought to temper expectations, with the official saying that the summit "is not a meeting where we expect deliverables to be coming out."

Initiated by Biden, the meeting was set for Monday at 7:45 pm in Washington (0045 GMT Tuesday), which in Beijing was 8:45 am Tuesday.

Biden, a veteran of foreign policy issues during his decades in politics, has often said phone conversations are no substitute for face-to-face meetings.

Xi has not left China for nearly two years, and Biden sharply criticized his absence at the recent COP26 climate summit in Glasgow and G20 summit in Rome.

- Biden gets domestic boost -

Relations between the superpowers plummeted during the presidency of Donald Trump, who launched a trade war with China while assailing Beijing's response to an international probe into the origins of the Covid pandemic in the Chinese city of Wuhan.

Biden has recast the confrontation more broadly as a struggle between democracy and autocracy.

He got a boost on Monday when he signed into law a $1.2 trillion infrastructure package, the biggest of its kind in more than half a century. Biden describes the initiative as an important step in catching up with years of intensive Chinese government investments, thereby proving that democracies can compete.

"The world is changing," he said. "We have to be ready."

While the day-to-day tone is more measured than in the Trump era, tension over Taiwan is threatening to escalate into dangerous new territory.

China has ramped up military activities near Taiwan in recent years, with a record number of warplanes intruding into the island's air defense zone in October.

The United States says it supports Taiwan's self-defense but is ambiguous about whether it would intervene to help directly.

"Any connivance of and support for the 'Taiwan independence' forces undermines peace across the Taiwan Strait and would only boomerang in the end," Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told US Secretary of State Antony Blinken in a telephone call heading into the weekend.

And China's foreign ministry on Monday put the onus on Biden to improve relations.

"We hope that the US will work in the same direction as China to get along with each other," foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian told reporters.

The US administration official signaled Biden would be "very direct" on what he called "China's coercive and provocative behavior with respect to Taiwan."

But the official also stressed that the two nations had room for cooperation in various areas, such as climate change.

Bill Richardson: former US diplomat, global troubleshooter
Washington (AFP) Nov 15, 2021 - Bill Richardson has served as an ambassador, cabinet secretary and governor of New Mexico, but since he returned to being a regular US citizen, he has dedicated his life to a role with similarly high stakes.

Richardson is a freelance envoy, specializing in high-profile, difficult negotiations to obtain the release of Americans detained by hostile governments.

And on Monday, he celebrated his 74th birthday with his latest victory: facilitating the release of American journalist Danny Fenster from a prison in Myanmar, where he was jailed for 11 years last week -- and faced a possible life sentence.

Fenster was freed on "humanitarian grounds" and deported by the ruling junta in Myanmar.

The Richardson Center, founded by the former US ambassador to the United Nations, tweeted a photo of him standing with Fenster in front of a small plane on the tarmac in Myanmar's capital Naypyidaw.

The center said the release of the 37-year-old Fenster had been secured following "face-to-face negotiations" between Richardson and junta chief Min Aung Hlaing, who is the target of US sanctions after seizing power in a February coup.

However, just a week ago, Richardson had told AFP in an interview, at the conclusion of a previous "humanitarian" mission to Myanmar, that he had not raised Fenster's case in his meetings.

At the time, he said, without offering more details, that the State Department had specifically asked him not to discuss the issue.

In private, US officials suggested they were frustrated by Richardson's activism, and expressed concern that it could undermine Washington's official efforts on Fenster's behalf.

The State Department had regularly insisted it was doing everything in its power to obtain Fenster's freedom.

On Monday after Fenster's release, department spokesman Ned Price reiterated that Richardson had not gone to Myanmar "at the direction of the US government."

But he added: "We have been in regular and, in more recent hours, almost constant contact with the governor and with his team."

In a statement, Fenster's family offered thanks to all who helped secure his release, "especially Ambassador Richardson" -- without a specific word of thanks to the US government.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken thanked the veteran Democrat as well.

- Diplomatic gunslinger -

Born on November 15, 1947, Richardson -- son of a Mexican mother and American father -- showed an early flair for baseball, and was drafted as a pitcher by the Kansas City Royals.

When a professional career in sports did not pan out, Richardson earned a bachelor's degree at Tufts University and did a Master's degree at its prestigious Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.

He was one of the first members of the Hispanic community to assume a cabinet-level position in the US government.

His resume is impressive: he is a former congressman, UN envoy, energy secretary under Bill Clinton in the late 1990s, and then two-term governor of New Mexico.

Richardson was the first Latino to run for the US presidency, with a fleeting bid in the Democratic primaries in 2007 -- a process that eventually yielded Barack Obama as the party's candidate.

Richardson backed Obama, but ended up withdrawing his name from consideration to be his commerce secretary when a federal investigation over campaign finance derailed his nomination in 2009.

In parallel with his traditional career in politics, Richardson developed a reputation as a diplomatic gunslinger, and was even sometimes dubbed the "Indiana Jones" of American diplomacy.

He held high-stakes private face-to-face meetings with a who's who of strongmen on the US pariah list, including Iraq's Saddam Hussein, Cuba's Fidel Castro, North Korea's Kim Jong Il (father of current leader Kim Jong Un) and Venezuela's Nicolas Maduro.

The Richardson Center for Global Engagement says one of its primary missions is "negotiating for the release of prisoners and hostages held by hostile regimes or criminal organizations."

Indeed, Richardson has several successes under his belt, but also a few setbacks, which are deftly underplayed by his media-savvy team.

His missions have extended to wider political issues, such as North Korea's nuclear program or diplomatic overtures to Myanmar's junta -- work that has elicited criticism from rights activists who accuse him of offering legitimacy to authoritarian regimes.

"I'm not a government. I don't legitimize governments," Richardson told AFP last week.

"I'm just one person that is trying to make a difference."

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Biden, Xi expected to hold virtual summit on Monday: US media
Washington (AFP) Nov 12, 2021
US President Joe Biden is expected to hold a hotly awaited virtual summit with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping on Monday, US media reported, as tensions mount over Taiwan, human rights and trade. Both CNN and Politico, citing unnamed sources, said the meeting was tentatively scheduled for Monday. Relations between the world's two largest economies have deteriorated in recent weeks, in particular over Taiwan, a self-ruling democracy claimed by China, which last month made a record number of a ... read more