By Jihoon Lee and Eduardo Baptista
GYEONGJU (Reuters) -China’s Xi Jinping will take centre stage at an annual gathering of Pacific Rim leaders in South Korea on Friday, holding talks with Canadian and Japanese 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 is a key focus of this year’s APEC talks, hosted in the historic town of Gyeongju. The 21-member economic club aims to encourage cooperation and reduce trade and investment barriers, though decisions made at meetings are non-binding and consensus has been increasingly difficult.
XI MEETS 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.
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 focused on defending Japan’s islands from an increasingly assertive China. 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 Jinping at 4:00 p.m. local time (0700 GMT), his office said, aiming to restart broad engagement with China after years of poor relations.
Embroiled in a bitter trade war with its biggest trading partner the United States, Canada is aiming to wean itself off that overwhelming dependence and seek new markets. 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.
BESSENT STANDS IN FOR TRUMP
Deputising for Trump, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent will participate in the opening session of the summit, where South Korean Prime Minister Lee Jae Myung will host a discussion on “restoring the will to cooperate in the Asia-Pacific region”.
South Korean Foreign Minister Cho Hyun said on Thursday that negotiations were still taking place on a joint statement even for the ministerial meeting itself, but added that he was hopeful it would be adopted together with a leaders’ declaration when the summit concludes on Saturday.
“We are very close,” he told a briefing. 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.
Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang will be speaking this afternoon to a gathering of executives running parallel to the APEC Summit.
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)
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