G20: Indonesia’s Joko Widodo caps hectic week as summit host with Xi Jinping meeting, urges all sides to cool tensions
- President Widodo, host of G20 summit in Bali, met China’s Xi Jinping; they watched a remote trial run of China-Indonesia rail project
- Widodo said summit a success despite ‘tough discussion’ surrounding the issue of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine
Indonesia’s President Joko Widodo on Wednesday capped a hectic two days as the host of the G20 summit with bilateral talks with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping, with both leaders remotely witnessing a trial run of a long-delayed Beijing-backed railway project.
In a press conference earlier in an intense day of diplomatic buzz in Bali, following a fatal rocket strike inside Poland, Widodo once again used his pulpit as the G20’s chair to call for a de-escalation of geopolitical tensions.
Xi’s Bali meeting with Widodo went ahead even as bilateral talks with the British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak were called off following scheduling changes due to emergency discussions over the Poland blast.
Xi and Widodo, who last met in Beijing in July, sat side by side as they watched the trial run of the US$7.97 billion high-speed railway that will connect Jakarta and the city of Bandung in West Java in 45 minutes, down from three hours of driving.
Speaking from Tegalluar station in Bandung, West Java, two machinists, from China and Indonesia respectively, asked permission from their own presidents to operate the yellow-and-white striped train, standing alongside a group of people wearing white shirts and waving both Chinese and Indonesian flags.