By Jihoon Lee, Eduardo Baptista and Ju-min Park
GYEONGJU (Reuters) -China’s Xi Jinping took centre stage at an annual gathering of Pacific Rim leaders in South Korea on Friday, expected to hold talks with Canadian, Japanese and Thai counterparts after securing a fragile trade truce with U.S. President Donald Trump.
That agreement, struck just before Trump left South Korea, skipping the main two-day Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, will suspend further curbs on China’s exports of rare earths that threatened to jam up global supply chains.
Bolstering supply chains and reducing trade barriers is a key focus of the talks, hosted in the historic town of Gyeongju. Yet decisions made at the 21-member economic club are non-binding and finding consensus has become increasingly difficult due to geopolitical strains.
“Changes unseen in a century are accelerating across the world,” Xi told the assembled leaders at the closed-door opening session on Friday morning, according to China’s foreign ministry.
“The rougher the seas, the more we must pull together,” Xi added, in a speech calling for protection of the multilateral trading system and deeper economic cooperation.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, standing in for Trump, said Washington was “rebalancing its trade relationships to build a stronger foundation for global growth”, according to remarks released by his department.
The IMF initially cut the global growth outlook after Trump’s April barrage of trade tariffs, but has edged it back up as shocks and financial conditions have proved more benign than expected.
XI SET TO MEET JAPAN’S NEW HAWKISH LEADER
With the leader of the world’s biggest economy absent, attention turns to Xi, who is expected to hold his first talks with Japan’s newly elected leader Sanae Takaichi.
The leaders are expected to hold talks on Friday, sources familiar with the matter said. Before she departed for the summit on Thursday, Takaichi told reporters that arrangements were underway to meet Xi.
While relations between the historic rivals have been on a sounder footing in recent years, Takaichi’s surprise elevation to become Japan’s first female leader may strain ties due to her nationalistic views and hawkish security policies.
One of her first acts since taking office last week was to accelerate a military build-up aimed at deterring the territorial ambitions of an increasingly assertive China in East Asia. Japan also hosts the biggest concentration of U.S. military abroad.
The detention of Japanese nationals in China and Beijing’s import restrictions on Japanese beef, seafood and agricultural products are also likely to be among sensitive issues on the agenda.
CANADA SEEKS TO RESTART CHINA ENGAGEMENT
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney will meet Xi at 4 p.m. (0700 GMT), his office said, aiming to restart broad engagement with China after years of poor relations.
Embroiled in a bitter trade dispute with the United States, Canada’s biggest trading partner, Carney told a gathering of executives running parallel to the main summit on Friday that Ottawa aimed to double its non-U.S. exports over the next decade.
China is Canada’s second-biggest trading partner.
Under the leadership of Carney’s predecessor Justin Trudeau, Canadians were detained and executed by the Chinese government and Canada’s security authorities concluded that China interfered in at least two federal elections. Xi also publicly scolded Trudeau, alleging he leaked their discussions to the press.
China announced preliminary anti-dumping duties on Canadian canola imports in August, a year after Canada said it would levy a 100% tariff on imports of Chinese electric vehicles. Senior officials from both sides met to discuss those issues earlier this month but gave no indication of any looming breakthrough.
Thai Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul is also due to meet Xi in the afternoon, Bangkok said, fresh from signing an enhanced ceasefire deal with neighbouring Cambodia on Sunday overseen by Trump.
The U.S. president has repeatedly touted himself as a global peace broker. Xi told Trump on Thursday that China also played a major role in advocating for dialogue and reconciliation on various pressing matters.
SOUTH KOREA HOPEFUL OF JOINT DECLARATION
South Korean Foreign Minister Cho Hyun said on Thursday that he was hopeful leaders would issue a joint declaration when the summit concludes on Saturday.
Two APEC member nation diplomats privately expressed scepticism that any statement would be particularly substantive given fractures in global politics. APEC failed to adopt a joint declaration in 2018 and 2019, during Trump’s first presidency.
The APEC region, which stretches from Russia to Chile, accounts for 50% of global trade and 61% of GDP.
Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang will be speaking this afternoon at the business gathering.
Huang has had a whirlwind week, with Nvidia becoming the first company to surpass a $5 trillion valuation but the issue of the U.S. chipmaker’s sale of advanced AI chips in China was seemingly left out of Thursday’s Xi-Trump summit.
(Reporting by Jihoon Lee, Ju-min Park and Eduardo Baptista in Gyeongju; Writing by John Geddie; Editing by Michael Perry)
