U.S. President Donald Trump said Tuesday he hoped to close a “good” trade deal with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping at a regional summit next week, though he warned the meeting between the two could be canceled.
Trump has repeatedly changed his mind about meeting Xi at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in South Korea since first announcing the meeting.
"We're going to have a fair deal, and I think we're going to have a very successful meeting. Certainly, there are a lot of people who are looking forward to this," Trump said during a luncheon with Republican senators at the White House.
But then he added: “Maybe it won’t happen. Things can happen where, for example, maybe someone says, ‘I don’t want to meet.’ It’s too unpleasant.”
Trump first announced on September 19 that he would meet with Xi in South Korea, marking the first meeting between the two leaders since the tycoon's return to the White House, and that he planned to travel to China early next year.
But on October 10, he threatened to cancel that meeting with Xi and raise tariffs on Chinese imports after Beijing imposed restrictions on the export of rare earth minerals.
The US president has softened his stance. On Monday, he said again that they would meet and that his trip to China"early next year" was "more or less set."
Xi is not the only leader toward whom Trump has shown a change of heart recently.
Last Thursday he said he will meet with Russian leader Vladimir Putin in Budapest in two weeks to discuss the war in Ukraine.
But the White House said Tuesday that there are no plans for a meeting “in the immediate future.”
On Monday, Trump singled out rare earths, fentanyl, and soybeans as the main points of contention with China. He said the U.S. wants China to stop shipping fentanyl and resume buying soybeans, and to prevent it from “playing the rare earth game” with Washington.
“I don’t want them to play the rare earth game with us,” Trump declared aboard Air Force One on Sunday, returning to Washington from Florida. Days earlier, he had threatened to impose a 100% tariff on Chinese shipments after Beijing announced sweeping controls on the strategic minerals.
Trump also claimed the US wants China to"stop the fentanyl," referring to his accusation that Beijing has failed to control exports of the opioid and its precursor chemicals, contributing to the US addiction crisis. Another key demand was that China resume soybean purchases. All three issues, he added, were"very normal things."
