Trump-Xi trade war summit at G20 in Japan still up in the air as ‘conditions not right’, China adviser says
- China’s president met his US counterpart in December in Argentina during a G20 summit which led to a three-month tariff truce which was then extended
- The United States has since raised tariffs on US$200 billion of Chinese imports and threatened to impose sanctions on a further US$300 billion
A meeting between Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Donald Trump at the G20 summit in Japan next month is still up in the air as the “current conditions” are not right, a Chinese state researcher said.
“Given the current conditions, what can really come out of the G20?” said Zhang Yansheng, the chief research fellow at the state-backed China Centre for International Economic Exchanges think tank, at a government-arranged press briefing on Wednesday. “We in the East need to save our face whereas the Americans have complete disregard for that. I think we need to wait and see.”
While Zhang’s agency is not directly involved in planning Xi’s overseas trips, his comments suggest that Beijing is not in a rush to arrange a formal sit-down summit between the two leaders as they did in Argentina in December, playing down expectations that Trump and Xi are likely to meet next month to break the impasse in the trade talks.
China’s foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang said on Thursday that China is open to resuming the trade talks, but that the sanctions the US placed on Huawei and other Chinese firms last week are “not helping to create a conducive environment for negotiations”. China’s Ministry of Commerce spokesman Gao Feng did not answer a question at a briefing, also on Thursday, over whether Xi and Trump will meet in Osaka.
The dispute between Washington and Beijing further escalated last week when Trump banned US companies from using foreign telecommunications equipment deemed to be a national security risk. He also added China’s Huawei, the world’s largest telecommunications equipment maker, to a trade blacklist. As a result, Huawei suppliers including Google, have suspended their shipments of certain hardware components, software and services.