NYT Biden Faces Delicate Two-Step in Asia Over East China Sea Dispute

Overlapping Airspace Claims in the East China Sea

• Interactive Map: Territorial Claims in South China Sea

Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in Tokyo on Tuesday.

Shuttling from one feuding neighbor to the other, Mr. Biden arrived here from Tokyo to urge China’s president, Xi Jinping, to show restraint in the restricted zone, which Mr. Biden said the United States regarded as illegitimate and a provocation.

After 5½ hours of meetings, in which Mr. Biden laid out the American case against China’s action and Mr. Xi made a forceful counterargument, senior administration officials said, “President Xi took on board what the vice president said. It’s up to China, and we’ll see how things will unfold in the coming days and weeks.”

Mr. Xi’s response suggested China and Japan may be able to manage a standoff that had threatened to escalate dangerously, with China scrambling fighter jets to intercept Japanese airliners flying off the Chinese coast.

In brief public remarks midway through the meetings, Mr. Biden made no reference to the dispute, but said the relationship between the United States and China “ultimately has to be based on trust, and a positive notion about the motive of one another.”

Mr. Xi, who cultivated unusually personal ties to Mr. Biden when he was China’s vice president, sounded a more upbeat note about the broader relationship, though he conceded “regional hot-spot issues keep cropping up.”

He welcomed Mr. Biden as “my old friend” and said nothing directly about the air defense zone.

For Mr. Biden, however, China’s sudden action last month upended what was meant to be tour of Asia with a wide-ranging agenda. Instead, he has had to walk a fine line: defending an ally and rebuking a potential adversary, while preventing a spat over a clump of islands in the East China Sea from mushrooming into a wider conflict.

A day earlier in Tokyo, Mr. Biden condemned China’s action as an effort to “unilaterally change the status quo” and said it had raised “the risk of accidents and miscalculation.” He promised to raise those objections with Mr. Xi in Beijing.

Mr. Biden stopped short of calling on China to rescind the zone, something it is highly unlikely to do, given the nationalist sentiments that have been animated by its standoff with Japan. The United States military has ignored the zone, dispatching B-52 bombers last week to fly through it.

Shortly after Mr. Biden arrived, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said the new air defense identification zone was a fact of life that the world needed to accept.

The spokesman at the ministry, Hong Lei, described it as a “zone of cooperation, and not confrontation.”

Since the zone was announced on Nov. 23, 55 airlines from 19 countries had provided China with flight information, he said. The Federal Aviation Administration has advised civilian aircraft to comply with China’s request when flying into the airspace.

The F.A.A.'s guidance, which officials said was routine, unsettled Japanese officials, who had instructed their carriers not to identify themselves to the Chinese. But Mr. Biden’s strong words, combined with his appeal to China’s top leader, appears to have smoothed over that flap.

“The vice president seems to have put them back on track,” said Michael J. Green, an adviser on Asia in the George W. Bush administration. “Beijing may not like, and he probably did not want his trip to be all about this, but he had to send a strong message of dissuasion.”

Mr. Xi’s sanguine words were calculated to send a different message, according to China experts.

“A reason for Xi’s tone is a desire to make U.S. allies, especially Japan, uneasy about U.S. support by suggesting subliminally that the U.S.-China relationship is more important than other relationships, and the U.S. is keeping it sound despite China-Japan relations,” said Jeffrey A. Bader, a former China adviser to President Obama.

Mr. Xi, repeating a phrase he used at a meeting with Mr. Obama in Southern California last June, said China wanted to build a “new model of major-country relations,” based on respecting each other’s core interests, collaborating on global problems, and devising ways to “appropriately handle sensitive issues and differences between us.”

Mr. Biden, while embracing that formulation, said the relationship between China and the United States needed candor and trust. He said Mr. Xi had been candid in their previous meetings, and Mr. Biden’s aides said their exchanges were similarly uninhibited on Wednesday, ranging widely to include history and politics.

Another major area of focus, American officials said, was North Korea, which has entered another period of uncertainty with reports that a powerful uncle of the country’s supreme leader, Kim Jong-un, had been purged from his positions. Officials declined to say whether China had intelligence on the ouster of the uncle, Jang Song Thaek.

But they said Mr. Xi displayed renewed interest in pursuing a dual-track strategy of economic pressure and diplomacy to curb North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, prompted in part by the negotiations that recently led to an interim nuclear deal with Iran.

“They talked at some length about what the Iran example means for North Korea,” said a senior official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the contents of the meeting.

Mr. Biden, officials said, also quizzed Mr. Xi about the recent Communist Party Congress, which ratified far-reaching economic reforms, among them the liberalization of interest rates. The vice president, they said, pressed Mr. Xi to implement some reforms as quickly as possible, given that his most ambitious ideas will take years to put in place.

Before his meeting with Mr. Xi, Mr. Biden dropped in on the consular section of the American Embassy to promote its efforts to streamline the issuing of visas, particularly to students seeking to study in the United States. While there, he delivered a pitch to a line of people, many of them teenagers, waiting to submit applications.

“We’re constantly looking for bright, intelligent, innovative young people to come to America and stay in America,” Mr. Biden said. “I hope you learn that innovation can only occur where you can breathe free, challenge the government, challenge religious leaders.”

Mr. Biden’s audience applauded respectfully, though his words were less relevant to them, since the embassy only processes visas for temporary stays in the United States, not immigrant visas.