By Trevor Hunnicutt and Liz Lee
BEIJING, May 15 (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump and China’s Xi Jinping are set to meet on Friday to wrap up a two-day state visit that has featured pomp and business deals but also a warning from Xi that mishandling the Taiwan issue could send relations spiraling.
Trump is on the first visit by a U.S. president to China, America’s main strategic and economic rival, since his last in 2017, and has been seeking tangible results to beef up his dented approval ratings ahead of crucial midterm elections.
“Hopefully our relationship with China will be stronger and better than ever before!” Trump wrote in a post on his Truth Social platform early on Friday.
He described Xi as a “warm person” but “all business” in a pre-recorded interview on Fox News’ ‘Hannity’ program.
Trump and Xi are set to have tea and lunch at the walled-off Zhongnanhai complex, a former imperial garden that houses the offices of Chinese leaders, before Trump departs.
The summit has been aimed at maintaining a fragile trade truce struck when the leaders last met in October and Trump suspended triple-digit tariffs on Chinese goods and Xi backed away from choking global supplies of vital rare earths.
On Thursday, Xi told Trump that negotiations on trade issues had reached “balanced and positive outcomes”, without elaborating.
U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, who is with Trump in China, told Bloomberg TV on Friday it had not yet been decided whether to extend the truce beyond its expiry later this year.
Deals on Chinese purchases of farm goods, beef and Boeing aircraft have been firmed up, Greer added, and progress was made on establishing mechanisms to manage future trade, with both sides expected to identify $30 billion of non-sensitive goods.
The Taiwan issue should not push that off the rails, he said.
Trump told Fox News that China had agreed to order 200 Boeing jets, its first purchase of U.S.-made commercial jets in nearly a decade. That was far short of the roughly 500 markets had expected, and Boeing shares fell more than 4% after the comments.
U.S. export controls on semiconductor chips were not a major discussion, Greer said in comments that suggest a breakthrough on selling Nvidia’s advanced H200 chips to China remains far away, despite CEO Jensen Huang’s last-minute addition to the trip.
Trump has also been expected to urge China to convince Iran to make a deal with Washington to end a war unpopular with American voters.
But his hand has been weakened in Beijing, after U.S. courts curbed his ability to levy tariffs at will and price increases driven by the Iran war have made him politically vulnerable at home.
A brief U.S. summary of Thursday’s talks highlighted what the White House called the leaders’ shared desire to reopen the Strait of Hormuz off Iran and Xi’s apparent interest in American oil purchases to pare China’s dependence on Middle East supply.
A fifth of global supplies of oil and liquefied natural gas travel through the Strait in normal times.
“President Xi would like to see a deal made,” Trump told Fox News. “And he did offer. He said, ‘If I can be of any help at all, I would like to be of help.'”
STARK WARNING
Xi’s remarks on Taiwan, the democratically governed island Beijing claims, delivered a sharp, if not unprecedented, warning during a summit that otherwise appeared friendly and relaxed.
Taiwan, which lies just 50 miles (80 km) off China’s coast, has long been a flashpoint in U.S.-China ties, with Beijing refusing to rule out the use of military force to gain control of the island and the United States bound by law to provide Taipei with the means to defend itself.
“U.S. policy on the issue of Taiwan is unchanged as of today,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is also traveling with Trump, told NBC News, adding the Chinese “always raise it … we always make clear our position and we move on.”
Taiwan Foreign Minister Lin Chia-lung thanked the United States on Friday for repeatedly expressing its support.
The China-U.S. relationship is the most important in the world, Xi said at Thursday’s lavish state banquet, adding, “We must make it work and never mess it up.”
JAILED CHINA CRITIC JIMMY LAI
Rubio said Trump had brought up with Xi the issue of Hong Kong’s most vocal China critic, media tycoon Jimmy Lai, sentenced in February to 20 years in jail in the Asian financial hub’s biggest national security case.
“The president always raises that case and a couple others, and obviously we’ll hope to get a positive response from that,” Rubio told NBC News.
“We’d be open to any arrangement that would work for them, as long as he’s given his freedom,” he said of Lai, who has denied all the charges against him.
Hong Kong affairs are an internal matter for China, the foreign ministry has said previously when asked about Lai.
(Reporting by Trevor Hunnicutt, Liz Lee, Antoni Slodkowski and Mei Mei Chu in Beijing; Ben Blanchard in Taipei; Writing by David Brunnstrom and John Geddie; Editing by Alistair Bell, Lincoln Feast and Clarence Fernandez)
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