Chinese leader Xi Jinping and US President Donald Trump have begun a landmark meeting in South Korea that could reset the volatile relationship between the world’s two largest economies and rival superpowers.
Both leaders offered warm remarks as their talks – the leaders’s first face-to-face in six years – got underway at an airbase in the coastal city of Busan, near to where an international summit is taking place.
Trump praised Xi as the “great leader of a great country” and said he thought the two “were going to have a fantastic relationship for a long period of time,” while the Chinese leader said it was a “great pleasure” to see Trump after many years.
“We do not always see eye to eye with each other, and it is normal for the two leading economies of the world to have frictions now and then … you and I at the helm of China-US relations should stay the right course,” Xi said, adding the two nations could “prosper together.”
The world is closely watching for whether the two leaders can stabilize their countries’ fractious relationship during the meeting, which caps off the US president’s five-day, three-country visit to Asia.
The global economy has for months been roiled by a tit-for-tat of mounting tariffs, export controls and other penalties hitting areas from high-tech goods to high-seas shipping, as the US and China have vacillated between escalation and negotiation.
At the crux of those tensions are a gaping trade imbalance and efforts from the US to ensure its national security against an increasingly assertive China, including by expanding restrictions on China’s access to American advanced tech, like the advanced semiconductors needed to power AI.
On the table before the two leaders, who are meeting at Busan’s Gimhae Air Base, are a range of thorny issues including tariffs and their trade imbalance, China’s sweeping export controls on rare earths, US restrictions on Chinese access to American high-tech, and China’s role in the illicit fentanyl trade.
China’s purchases of American soybeans, the future in the US of the popular, Chinese-owned social media app TikTok, the war in Ukraine, as well as Taiwan are also topics likely to be on the leaders’ table over the course of their talks.
A meeting between US and Chinese trade negotiators over the weekend signaled that Trump and Xi could agree to a framework on navigating their ties going forward – but any agreement reached will be just one touchstone in a thorny and volatile great power rivalry between the world’s superpower democracy and an authoritarian China, whose growing military assertiveness under Xi in the East and South China Seas is rattling US allies in the region.
But both sides have seen a leader-level meeting as key to stabilize the relationship as they continue to grapple with how to structure their economic ties.
An outcome from Thursday’s talks that does that will be a boon for China, which wants predictability in its US relations while it sprints toward self-sufficiency from American high-tech, and also for Trump, whose meeting with Xi delivers a big-ticket finale for what has already been a dealmaking blitz across Asia.
(CNN)
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