At the beginning of their first face-to-face meeting in six years, US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping made cordial remarks at an airfield in the seaside city of Busan, South Korea close to the site of an international summit on Thursday.
The historic meeting between both the leaders in South Korea has the potential to stabilise the tense relationship between the two biggest economies in the world and rival superpowers.
The Chinese leader said it was a “great pleasure” to see Trump after many years, while Trump hailed Xi as the “great leader of a great country” and expressed his belief that the two “were going to have a fantastic relationship for a long period of time.”
“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.”
However, just before arriving in Busan, Trump seemed to elevate the stakes of the summit by declaring the lifting of a more than three-decade moratorium on US nuclear testing, even amid cordial handshakes and compliments.
Trump claimed that the United States “has more Nuclear Weapons than any other country.” According to him, Russia came in second and China “a distant third, but will be even within 5 years.”
“Because of other countries testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis. That process will begin immediately,” he wrote on Truth Social.
The two leaders reappeared an hour and 40 minutes later, and at the end of their discussion, they were seen shaking hands. After that, Trump ended his tour to Asia by boarding Air Force One without addressing the media.
The summit, which concludes the US president’s five-day, three-country Asia visit, is being eagerly watched by the world to see if the two leaders can resolve their countries’ tense relationship.
As the US and China have alternated between aggression and negotiation, the world economy has been rocked for months by a tit-for-tat of increasing tariffs, export restrictions, and other penalties affecting everything from high-tech exports to high-seas shipping.
A massive trade imbalance and US measures to protect its national security against a more aggressive China including tightening limitations on the nation’s access to US high tech, such as the sophisticated semiconductors required to power artificial intelligence–are at the heart of those tensions.
The two presidents met at the Gimhae Air Base in Busan and discussed several difficult issues, such as tariffs, China’s extensive export restrictions on rare earths, US limits on Chinese access to American high-tech, and China’s involvement in the illegal fentanyl trade.
According to Trump, Xi has consented to a one-year suspension of China’s export restrictions on rare earth materials, which will probably be “routinely extended.”
The war in Ukraine, Taiwan, the future of the Chinese-owned social media app TikTok in the US, and China’s purchases of American soybeans are all likely to have come up during the leaders’ discussions.
At the conclusion of a weekend summit between US and Chinese trade negotiators in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, both parties were hopeful that Trump and Xi might reach an agreement on a framework for managing their future relations.
According to people familiar with the situation who spoke with CNN, expectations increased throughout the US president’s visit to Asia in the hopes that the agreement would result in more than just a casual meeting between the two world leaders.
Despite Trump’s remarks regarding trade with China, Asian markets are down.
Despite Trump’s positive remarks to reporters following his meeting with Xi, investors seemed to react with early scepticism.
When markets resumed on Thursday following their noon break, Chinese share values declined.
All around the region, share values fell, with Hong Kong’s Hang Seng falling 0.7 percent and Japan’s benchmark Nikkei 225 down 0.3 percent.
The Shanghai Composite index saw a 0.7 percent decline.
Oil prices and US futures both fell.