U. S. President Donald Trump said the “incredible relationship” he and China President Xi Jinping had would be “the very primary reason” they could make progress on trade, though he offered no specific solutions.
U. S. President Donald Trump told Chinese President Xi Jinping on Saturday he hoped they would achieve “something great” on trade for both countries as they opened a high-stakes summit aimed at defusing a damaging tariffs war between Washington and Beijing.
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Trade on the menu as Trump, Xi Jinping set for dinner talks to wrap up G20
With the United States and China locked in an economic dispute that has unnerved global financial markets and weighed on the world economy, Trump and Xi sat down with their aides for a working dinner at the end of a two-day gathering of world leaders in Buenos Aires.
Their closely watched meeting came shortly after the Group of 20 industrialized nations backed an overhaul of the global body that regulates international trade disputes, marking a victory for Trump, a sharp critic of the organization.
Trump struck a positive note as he sat across from Xi, despite the U. S. president’s earlier threats to impose new tariffs on Chinese imports.
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“We’ll be discussing trade and I think at some point we are going to end up doing something great for China and great for the United States,” Trump said when a small pool of reporters was briefly allowed into the room.
He suggested that the “incredible relationship” he and Xi had established would be “the very primary reason” they could make progress on trade, though he offered no specifics on how they might resolve the main issue dividing their countries.
Xi told Trump that only through cooperation could the United States and China serve the interest of peace and prosperity. The world’s two biggest economies have also increasingly been at odds over security in the Asia-Pacific region.
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At the same time, Trump again raised with Xi his concern about the synthetic opioid fentanyl being sent from China to the United States, urging the Chinese leader to place it in a “restricted category” of drugs that would criminalize it.
Earlier on Saturday, the leaders of all the world’s top economies called for reforms to the crisis-stricken World Trade Organization in a final statement from their summit.
