WASHINGTON – President Biden will meet Chinese President Xi Jinping next week in California and no topic is off-limits, senior administration officials said Friday  – but Republicans worry Biden won’t be tough enough.

From trade to Taiwan, Biden intends to address a plethora of issues with Xi – including the spy balloon China deployed across the United States early this year, the officials said.

“We’ve indicated to Chinese interlocutors that basically every element in our bilateral issue our bilateral relationship will be on the table for discussion,” one official said. “After investing at home and strengthening ties with our partners abroad, now is precisely the time for high level diplomacy.”

The two leaders will meet Wednesday on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in San Francisco, during which officials from the group’s 21 member countries will meet to discuss regional issues involving trade.

The one-on-one with Xi comes after the Biden administration has spent the last eight months “work[ing] to restore diplomatic interaction” between the US and China.

“The national security adviser met with … Foreign Minister Wang Yi three times, the Secretar[ies] of State, Treasury and Commerce went to Beijing,” an official said. “China, for its part, since its vice president, foreign minister, vice premier and other senior officials here to the United States in recent months for meeting.”

Biden is relying on that communication strategy with other nations in his prep for next week.

On Friday, the president held a call with Haitham bin Tariq Al Said, the Sultan of Oman, after reports circulated that China aims to build a military base in the Middle Eastern nation.

Though Xi has spoken openly about his desire to expand China’s presence throughout the globe through foreign military bases, Beijing has not confirmed the report. Aside from its benefit to China, a base on Oman could cause problems for Washington’s relations with the Arabian state, which regularly mediates between the US and Iran.

The White House hopes communications can expand further between the two nations as a result of the meeting, with a key prerogative being the restoration of military-to-military channels after Beijing stopped all contact with the Pentagon following then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s controversial trip to Taiwan last August.

“I think the balloon episode underscored the difficulty we had at the time to be able to establish high level consequential communications with Beijing,” the official said.

One official said to expect that Biden will bring up “broad parameters” of restoring such communication lines with Xi, noting that the spy balloon represented a wake-up call to the “need for communications between our two sides.”

But Republicans are concerned that all the focus on diplomacy will mean Biden won’t get tough with the Communist leader. On Fox News Friday, Former US Ambassador to the United Nations and 2024 presidential hopeful Nikki Haley predicted Biden is “not going to call Xi out on anything.”

“There’s a lot of questions we need to talk about. But the one thing I can promise you is going to come out is they’re going to have a conversation about the weather, and talk about the environment and talk about how they’re going to ‘work together’ on that,” Haley said.

She further blasted Biden for “begg[ing] for this meeting,” alleging that Xi is only willing to meet with the US president because he is “not scared” of him.

“He sent four Cabinet members to China to go and try and court the Chinese and so now they’re going to grant him a meeting,” she said. “But the key is, what’s he going to talk about in the meeting?”

“What he should talk about in the meeting is the fact that they have to stop murdering Americans by sending fentanyl, they have to stop stealing our intellectual property so that they can build up their military, they have to tell us why they’re putting a military and spy base in Cuba, just off our shores,” she added.

While one of the officials said Biden would “press assertively next week” because “the Chinese have been reluctant to meet,” Republicans on the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party urged the president in a letter Thursday to get tougher on Xi – instead of continuing his “repeated concessions” to Beijing and “self-censorship of defensive actions.”

“While we share your desire to deter a devastating conflict with the [People’s Republic of China], we are concerned that the recent prioritization of bilateral engagement has come at an unacceptable cost to ‘competitive’ or defensive actions that have been delayed, scuttled, or otherwise dropped in an effort to get the PRC to the table — all for poorly defined benefit,” they wrote.

The group also acknowledged that “in many ways, the summit marks the culmination of efforts by your administration over the last year and a half to engage with the People’s Republic of China in the hopes of ‘building a floor under the relationship” – but they didn’t mean it as a compliment.

“While your administration’s public position on competition and cooperation with the PRC has remained the same, it is clear that competitive actions have been sacrificed to advance aimless, zombie-like engagement,” they wrote.

The White House officials defended Biden’s approach, with one saying that the administration “believe[s] that intense competition requires and demands intense diplomacy to manage tension and to prevent competition from verging into conflict or confrontation.”

“We’re clear-eyed about this: We know efforts to shape or reform China over several decades, have failed,” the official said. “But we expect China to be around and to be a major player on the world stage for the rest of our lifetimes.”

One official explained that the administration believes that using diplomacy to “clear up misperceptions signal, communicate, avoid surprises and explain our competitive steps” is the best way to avoid conflict.

“This is not a change in our approach. The United States has decades of experience talking to any been working with competitors, when our interest is called port and this meeting with President Xi is in keeping with that tradition in American statecraft.”