WASHINGTON — The White House confirmed Thursday that President Biden will meet Monday with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Indonesia — but didn’t say if the first in-person encounter since Biden took office will address deadly fentanyl exports or the origins of COVID-19.

The Biden-Xi meeting in Bali follows a nosedive in relations between Washington and Beijing due to the coronavirus pandemic, China’s military maneuvers near Taiwan and former President Donald Trump’s tariffs-driven trade war.

COVID-19 has killed more than 1 million Americans after possibly leaking from a Wuhan, China, lab that was doing risky “gain of function” research — while fentanyl largely exported from China drove a record 107,000 US drug overdose deaths last year. 

“I expect them to discuss a range of regional and global issues to include Russia’s war in Ukraine and recent [North Korean] provocations,” a White House official told reporters on a Thursday morning call.

“Whether it’s managing strategic risk by continuing to press for some kinds of conversations around strategic stability or looking to be able to work together on climate change, particularly as COP27 is underway, these are all things I expect will be discussed by President Biden,” the official said.

Biden appeared to confirm the meeting with Xi during a Wednesday press conference when a journalist slyly asked him to discuss the US message to China about Taiwan. The president answered in a way that essentially confirmed the meeting on the sidelines of the G20 summit.

“I’ve told him: I’m looking for competition, not conflict,” Biden replied.

“I’m sure we’ll discuss China — excuse me, Taiwan,” Biden went on. “And I’m sure we’ll discuss a number of other issues, including fair trade and relationships relating to his relationship with other countries in the region.”

The White House-organized call for reporters on Thursday morning said the main thrust of the meeting would be “stopping the downward spiral” in the relationship and “working together where our interests align” to “build a floor.”

“One of the main objectives is really about their understanding of one another’s priorities and intentions, and where possible a control of misunderstandings and misperceptions … and ensuring we can have ongoing lines of communications,” the official said.

It’s possible that COVID-19 and fentanyl exports ultimately will be addressed by Biden and Xi, but the omission of the issues from initial official forecasts indicates they are not a top priority.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre declined to say at her regular briefing Thursday whether Biden would press Xi to be transparent on COVID-19 origins — saying, “I’m not gonna get it ahead of the agenda of what they’re going to discuss.”

At the same briefing Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan implied that anti-drug trafficking efforts might come up, but didn’t explicitly mention fentanyl, which is often mixed into cocaine and counterfeit prescriptions, killing unwitting Americans.

The summit will “involve giving direction to try to work on issues on which we do have common interests, whether it’s health, counternarcotics, climate or other areas,” Sullivan said.

The White House said that Biden and Xi directed their aides to work on reducing fentanyl exports in a July call, but Beijing reportedly broke off counternarcotics cooperation in protest of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s August visit to Taiwan.

Biden’s rare mentions of fentanyl and the origins of the pandemic contrasts with Trump’s approach. The ex-president regularly boasted that he pressured Xi into cracking down on exports of the powerful synthetic opioid and has floated forcing China to pay $50 trillion in “reparations” for the pandemic if he retakes the White House in 2024.

In August 2021, the US intelligence community said a laboratory release in Wuhan, China, was one of two “plausible” theories to explain the origins of the pandemic. At the time, Biden said in a written statement that “the world deserves answers, and I will not rest until we get them” and that “we all must better understand how COVID-19 came to be in order to prevent further pandemics.”

But the president has said very little about the matter since then.

Documents published last year by The Intercept revealed that EcoHealth Alliance used US taxpayer dollars on Wuhan lab experiments that modified three bat coronaviruses distinct from COVID-19 and discovered they became much more infectious among “humanized” mice when human-type receptors were added to them. 

In response to a question from The Post, Biden claimed in January that he pressed Xi to be transparent on the origins of the pandemic, even though then-press secretary Jen Psaki had given reporters the opposite impression. Biden said his own press team was unaware of him doing so because they weren’t in the room for his exchange with the Chinese leader on the topic.

The US president will meet with Xi despite online business records that indicate first son Hunter Biden still holds a 10% stake in BHR Partners, a Chinese state-backed private equity firm that manages $2.1 billion in assets and takes a prominent role in acquiring overseas assets.

Hunter Biden co-founded BHR Partners in 2013 within weeks of joining then-Vice President Joe Biden aboard Air Force Two on an official trip to Beijing, according to the Wall Street Journal. Hunter introduced his dad to incoming BHR CEO Jonathan Li in a hotel lobby and Joe Biden later wrote college recommendation letters for Li’s children.

The Journal reported that Hunter Biden’s “paid-in capital” to establish the company was $425,000, according to corporate registration records. Throughout 2021, Psaki said Hunter Biden was still working to “unwind” his 10% stake in BHR.

One week after President Biden’s November 2021 virtual summit with Xi, Hunter Biden’s attorney Chris Clark said the stake had been divested. However, online records show that the first son still holds the stake, and neither Clark nor the White House would provide further information on the supposed transaction.

In 2016, BHR Partners was influential in facilitating a deal in which a Chinese firm bought a Congolese cobalt mine from American and Canadian companies. The transaction gained significant attention last year when it was spotlighted by the New York Times and because cobalt is an important material for making electric vehicle batteries.

In a different Chinese business venture, Hunter Biden and his uncle James Biden earned $4.8 million from CEFC China Energy — an arm of Beijing’s foreign-influence “Belt and Road” initiative — in 2017 and 2018, according to the Washington Post.

A May 2017 email about the CEFC partnership says the “big guy” was due a 10% cut.

Two former Hunter Biden associates, Tony Bobulinski and James Gilliar, identified Joe Biden as the “big guy,” and Bobulinski says he met with Joe Biden about the deal.

The president has denied making any money from his son’s overseas business deals and the White House says he stands by his 2019 claim that he has never even discussed the enterprises with his son — despite evidence that he has interacted with Hunter’s associates from China, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Russia and Ukraine.