Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Thursday urged cooperation with the US on trade and investment, inviting US President Donald Trump to visit China in a cordial start to their first meeting likely to broach sensitive security and commercial issues.
Trump has said he wants to raise concerns about China’s trade practices and press Xi to do more to rein in North Korea’s nuclear ambitions during the Chinese leader’s two-day visit to the Spanish-style Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, although no major deals on either issue are expected.
The two sides should promote the “healthy development of bilateral trade and investment” and advance talks on a bilateral investment agreement, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Web site quoted Xi as saying.
Photo: AFP
“We have a thousand reasons to get China-US relations right, and not one reason to spoil the China-US relationship,” Xi told Trump.
Trump accepted Xi’s invitation to visit China later this year, Xinhua news agency cited officials as saying yesterday.
Xi and his wife, Peng Liyuan (彭麗媛), joined Trump and his wife, Melania, at a long table in an ornate candle-lit private dining room festooned with red and yellow floral centerpieces, where they dined on pan-seared Dover sole and New York strip steak.
Trump, a New York real-estate magnate before he ran for office, joked before dinner: “We’ve had a long discussion already, and so far I have gotten nothing, absolutely nothing. But we have developed a friendship — I can see that — and I think long term we are going to have a very, very great relationship and I look very much forward to it.”
Trump and Xi were expected to get into more detailed discussions about trade and foreign policy issues yesterday, concluding their summit with a working lunch.
“We have been treated unfairly and have made terrible trade deals with China for many, many years. That’s one of the things we are going to be talking about,” Trump told reporters ahead of the meeting.
The bilateral investment treaty mentioned by Xi, talks on which began during former US president George W. Bush’s administration and resumed under former US president Barack Obama, has received little attention since Trump took office.
Trump has yet to spell out a strategy for what his advisers called a trade relationship based on “the principle of reciprocity.”
He took his top economic and national advisers to Florida, including US Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, US Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin and US Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross.
“Even as we share a desire to work together, the United States does recognize the challenges China can present to American interests,” US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said at the summit.
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