US President Donald Trump did not take questions from reporters in China, forfeiting a potential opportunity to push Chinese leader Xi Jinping to face the press.
The choice for Trump and Xi not to take questions from reporters in China came by a request from that government, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said.
« It was at the Chinese insistence there were no questions today, » she said.
Former President Barack Obama also did not take questions from reporters on his first trip to China as president next to Hu Jintao, the Chinese leader at the time.
And a 2014 joint press event between Obama and Xi took weeks of negotiations between the White House and China.
At the 2014 event, New York Times reporter Mark Landler asked Xi in part about international press access in China. Xi initially seemed to bristle at the question, moving on to a Chinese reporter and then saying China had made progress on human rights and that The New York Times was the cause of its own access problems in China.
