What does "talking past one another" mean? [closed]

In the following sentence:

In fact, the two sides are talking past one another if they focus on how strict zero-covid policies are.

What does "talking past one another" mean?

Jack O'Flaherty kindly provided the source (chinastrategy.org) of your sentence in a comment below. I read the "if they focus" in your sentence as "when they focus/ by focusing."

talking past each other

Talking past each other is an English phrase describing the situation where two or more people talk about different subjects, while believing that they are talking about the same thing. Google Arts & Culture

talk past each other / talk past someone

A situation where two or more people talk about different subjects while believing they are talking about the same thing.

In American politics the left and the right simply talk past each other without having any real dialogue.

I know my parents' marriage is going to end in divorce—they constantly talk past each other.

Our company brought in an outside expert who found we were talking past our customers rather than having a real dialogue.

It's really important for parents to try to improve communication with their teenagers because it's very easy to talk past one another. oysterenglish.com

But the antebellum political worldviews often talked past one another, Whig confidence in a prudent, prosperous future making little sense to wary Jacksonians, skeptical of vague promises of a better tomorrow seemingly, to their eyes at least, at the expense of a comfortable, independent today. Joseph Pearson; The Whig's America

At the root of it, however, he believes there lies a "failure in communications," that "the debaters have talked past one another"; that "Woodward and his critics do seem to be discussing different problems." He goes on to observe that "the revisionists are talking mostly about practice and attitudes, Woodward about political rhetoric and law; they about social and economic structure, he about political and ideological superstructure." Comer Vann Woodward; The Future of the Past

A related idiom is

be/talk at cross purposes

(of two people or groups) misunderstand what the other is referring to or trying to do: Mary and I spoke about Anne for a minute or two before I realized we were talking at cross purposes: I meant Anne Smith and Mary meant Anne Harris. Farlex Partner Idioms Dictionary

An instance of this happened to me when I was living in Italy. I was at the counter in a cafe having coffee with an acquaintance. We were talking about our jobs and I used the word salary and he suddenly interrupted: How much? I was flustered by his asking so directly and I said something vague about my salary. He repeated the question more emphatically. We went back an forth a bit until I realized his hand was holding a spoonful of sugar from the counter's bowl over my espresso cup.