Okay...thanks for the information. I hadn’t heard anything in relation to the timing of them taking possession of the laptop after Harris withdrew.
2 Jan 2012: The Atlantic: Biden Gets China
by Steve Clemons, former Washington editor at Large at The Atlantic and editor of AtlanticLIVE
Biden’s Next Big Project: Recognizing that Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping will be China’s president-in-waiting through much of 2012, the White House will move Vice President Joe Biden to the helm of the Obama administration’s US-China policy.
A senior White House official has confirmed that Vice President Joe Biden will take the lead on the administration’s next phase China policy.
The White House official made clear that the coming shift in the locus of US-China policy management was not a critique of either Clinton or Geithner’s management of the China portfolio — but rather, the rise of Hu Jintao heir apparent and current Vice President Xi Jinping as the likely next President of China created certain practical challenges in dealing with him on a same-status level throughout much of 2012 until Xi’s accession to the presidency is formalized.
The view of some of the administration’s China-handlers is that management of US-China policy has become so central to a vast array of other policy challenges that the administration’s approach needs to be both broad and managed with “a deep and senior bench.”...
National Security Advisor Thomas Donilon has essentially been holding the China policy portfolio himself since September 2010 when in the early part of that month he and then Obama national economic advisor Lawrence Summers went to Beijing to attempt a reset in a quickly deteriorating US-China economic and military relationship. For the most part, currency politics aside, Donilon’s mission has succeeded — and he has since preempted either Clinton’s China hands, particularly Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell, or Geithner’s team from taking primacy over US-China policy.
The shift to a strategy of engagement with Biden at the top, orchestrated by Donilon, allows the US to deal with China’s likely next president from a Vice President to a Vice President/Next President status — and to continue both the Departments of State’s and Treasury’s ongoing engagement with other designated key Chinese leaders...
After President Obama’s 2008 presidential win, the original intention of the White House was to focus the Vice President primarily on domestic matters — telling this writer at the time to remember that Joe Biden had recently been featured in Working Mother magazine...
However, Joe Biden quietly took on national security tasks that were key to President Obama and that needed more off the newspaper front page handling...
Biden also played a leading role — along with Defense Secretary Bob Gates — in the “Russia reset.”
And whether Iraq’s democratic-appearing government survives or not, the person who did more than any other behind the scenes to broker the deals and to play communications envoy between factions of Iraq’s fractured political order was Joe Biden...
While this writer thinks he should be the person who does for US-Afghanistan policy what he did in the US-Iraq case, a topic for another day, Biden’s next big task will be the next phase evolution of US-China policy.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/01/biden-gets-china/250747/