Trump announces new US-China trade talks ahead of his G20 meeting with Xi
The diplomatic delegations from the US and China will have talks prior to a meeting between President Donald Trump and President Xi Jinping at the upcoming G20 summit in Japan later this month, the US leader said.
Trump and Xi had “a very good” phone conversation and agreed on future talks, the US president said in a tweet on Tuesday. He noted in particular that the two would have an “extended meeting” at the G20 summit in Osaka, which is scheduled to take place June 28 to 29.
Had a very good telephone conversation with President Xi of China. We will be having an extended meeting next week at the G-20 in Japan. Our respective teams will begin talks prior to our meeting.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 18, 2019
The Chinese leader stressed to Trump that the two countries should resolve all the outstanding issues through dialogue and on an equal footing. The key to reaching a lasting agreement is accommodating each other’s “reasonable concerns,” he stressed, according to Chinese state media.
The US and China are currently locked in a trade war initiated by the Trump administration, imposing tariffs and counter-tariffs on increasingly large amounts of each other’s exports. The conflict is expected to be the prime topic during a Trump-Xi meeting on the sidelines of the G20.
China’s reluctance to formally confirm that its president would be participating in the international event as announced earlier sparked some speculation that no bilateral meeting between him and Trump would take place and that the trade war between the world’s two largest national economies would escalate further.
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