At the APEC summit in South Korea, Donald Trump and Xi Jinping met in person for the first time since 2019. The meeting lasted 1 hour and 40 minutes. It was a closed-door meeting. There was no press conference, only comments in the Air Force One cabin. The Chinese agency Xinhua later released a short note in which Xi said that China’s development did not contradict Trump’s goal of ‘making America great again.’
The main outcome of the talks was that the US and China agreed on a one-year trade agreement. Trump said that tariffs on Chinese goods would be reduced from 57% to 47% and that the deal would be automatically renewed if the parties complied with the terms. Beijing, in turn, is giving the United States access to rare earth metals. All high-tech manufacturing depends on these metals: smartphones, chips, electric cars, communication systems. Accordingly, when Beijing recently introduced strict export controls on metals, it raised the risk of slowing down technological development in the US.
After the meeting, Trump said that he had accepted an invitation to visit China in April, and that Xi Jinping would go to the United States ‘a little later’. With that, Trump finished his tour across Asia that earlier took him to Malaysia, Japan, and South Korea, and flew back home.
