Trump departs Beijing after talks with Xi
The president was accompanied to the airport by Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi where a red carpet to awaited him, and sent off by dozens of schoolchildren, who waved American and Chinese flags and chanted “farewell” in unison.
In case you’re just joining us, here’s a recap of the day’s events as Donald Trump and Xi Jinping wrap up the second and final day of talks in their much-anticipated two-day summit. It’s 2pm in Beijing.
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The US president said “a lot of good” came from his China visit and “we’ve settled a lot of different problems that other people wouldn’t have been able to solve”. “We’ve made some fantastic trade deals for both countries,” Trump said while sitting next to Xi in Beijing’s Zhongnanhai leadership compound, where they were to hold their final talks of the summit.
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Trump also said: “We did discuss Iran. We feel very similar about [how] we want it to end. We don’t want them to have a nuclear weapon. We want the strait open.”
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US secretary of state Marco Rubio said the US policy on Taiwan had “not changed”. “It’s been pretty consistent across multiple presidential administrations, and remains consistent now,” he told NBC News.
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The White House said Trump and Xi had agreed during their talks on the need to keep the strait of Hormuz open. Trump said separately that his patience with Iran was running out, as a ship was reportedly seized by Iran off the United Arab Emirates. “I am not going to be much more patient,” Trump told Fox News. “They should make a deal.”
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Trump also said hunting down Iran’s enriched uranium was primarily for political optics, after Israel demanded it as a goal. “I just feel better if I got it, actually, but it’s – I think, it’s more for public relations than it is for anything else,” Trump told Fox News from China.
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US trade representative Jamieson Greer told Bloomberg TV the US believed China was being “very pragmatic” in respect to its involvement with Iran, and that he was confident Beijing would do whatever it could to limit material support for Tehran.
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Greer also said an agreement for double-digit billions of dollars in agriculture sales to China was expected after the Beijing summit. Asked by Bloomberg if the year-long trade truce with China expiring this October would be extended as a result of the Beijing summit, he said: “We’ll see about that … there’s certainly a willingness on both sides that – if this continues to work out well for each country – to continue that…”
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The US is hoping for a positive response from China on Washington’s appeals for the release of jailed media tycoon Jimmy Lai and others, Marco Rubio told NBC.
(source: theguardian.com)