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U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping are set to meet again Friday to wrap up a two-day state visit that has featured pomp and business deals — but also a stark warning from Xi that mishandling the Taiwan issue could push U.S.-China relations to “a very dangerous place.”
Trump is the first U.S. president to visit China, America’s main strategic and economic rival, since a 2017 visit during his first term. He has been hoping for tangible results that might improve his cratering approval ratings ahead of crucial midterm elections in November.
The two leaders were scheduled to have tea and lunch before Trump flies back to the United States.
“Hopefully our relationship with China will be stronger and better than ever before!” Trump wrote in a post on social media early Friday.
The summit has been aimed at maintaining a fragile trade truce struck when the leaders last met in October: Trump suspended triple-digit tariffs on Chinese goods, and Xi backed away from choking global supplies of vital rare earths.
With the Iran war unresolved, and the Strait of Hormuz still effectively closed, U.S. President Donald Trump has arrived in China in a weakened position for a high-stakes summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping — Trump’s first since 2017, during his first presidency.
Trump has also been expected to urge China to convince Iran to make a deal with Washington to end the war Trump helped to start, but which is unpopular with American voters. He has travelled to Beijing with a weakened hand after U.S. courts limited his ability to levy tariffs at will, and as price increases driven by the Iran war have made him politically vulnerable at home.
Beijing has so far shown little public interest in U.S. entreaties to get more involved in solving the conflict in Iran.
A brief U.S. summary of Thursday’s talks highlighted what the White House called the leaders’ shared desire to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, the waterway off Iran through which a fifth of global supplies of oil and liquefied natural gas travel in normal times, and Xi’s apparent interest in buying American oil to reduce China’s dependence on Middle East supplies.
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Trump told Fox News’ Sean Hannity that China had agreed to order 200 Boeing jets, its first purchase of U.S.-made commercial jets in nearly a decade. That total was much lower than markets were expecting. Media reports had suggested the planemaker was nearing a deal to sell 500 or more airplanes to China, and Boeing shares fell more than four per cent after the comments were aired.
Warning from Xi
Xi’s remarks on Taiwan, the democratically governed island Beijing claims, represented a sharp, if not unprecedented, warning during a pomp-filled summit that otherwise appeared friendly and relaxed.
China’s foreign ministry said they came in a closed-door meeting that ran more than two hours.
Taiwan, which lies just 80 kilometres off China’s coast, has long been a flashpoint in U.S.-China ties, with Beijing refusing to rule out the use of military force to gain control of the island and the United States bound by law to provide Taipei with the means to defend itself.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is with Trump in China, told NBC News that Taiwan was discussed, saying the Chinese “always raise it … we always make clear our position and we move on to the other topics.”
U.S. President Donald Trump is travelling to China on Tuesday, making a trip originally planned for March but cancelled after the U.S. and Israel launched a war against Iran. China is a major buyer of Iranian oil. The question of Taiwan’s independence is also expected to be raised in the meeting, as China views the territory as its own.
“U.S. policy on the issue of Taiwan is unchanged as of today,” Rubio added.
Trump did not respond to a reporter’s shouted question on whether the leaders had discussed Taiwan when he posed with Xi for photos at the Temple of Heaven, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
At Thursday’s lavish state banquet, Xi called the China-U.S. relationship the most important in the world and added: “We must make it work and never mess it up.”
Jailed China critic raised
When asked about Hong Kong’s most vocal China critic, media tycoon Jimmy Lai, who was sentenced to 20 years in jail in February on two counts of conspiracy to collude with foreign forces and one count of publishing seditious materials, Rubio said Trump had raised the case with Xi.
“The president always raises that case and a couple others, and obviously we’ll hope to get a positive response from that,” Rubio told NBC News.
“We’d be open to any arrangement that would work for them, as long as he’s given his freedom,” he said of Lai, who has denied all charges against him.
A Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson, when asked about Lai, has previously said that Hong Kong affairs were an internal matter for China.
