Their call, the second between the two leaders since Biden became president, "highlighted Washington's growing anxiety and need for China's cooperation on key global issues including climate change, COVID-19 fight and Afghan issues," China's English-language Global Times, considered a mouthpiece for the Chinese Communist Party, wrote in a post Friday morning, citing a series of local analysts.
It emphasized multiple times what it considers the "huge pressure" Biden now faces amid a series of mounting international crises that require at least some form of coordination between Washington and Beijing: fallout from the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Western-backed government's shocking collapse, gloomy new public health assessments amid the troubling rise of the delta variant of the coronavirus, rising tensions in the western Pacific as an emboldened Beijing exercises its growing economic and military power, and the ravaging effects of climate change that have been particularly evident across the U.S.
