President Donald Trump said he would urge China’s Xi Jinping to “open up” to U.S. business during his trip to a summit in Beijing on Wednesday. He also added Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang to a group of executives travelling with him, following a stop in Alaska en route.
As Trump prepared for the pomp-filled occasion, his top trade negotiator Scott Bessent held talks with Chinese officials in South Korea aimed at maintaining a fragile trade deal between the world's top two economies struck last year.
The CEOs accompanying Trump are drawn mainly from companies seeking to resolve business issues with China, such as Nvidia, which has struggled to get regulatory permission to sell its powerful H200 artificial intelligence (AI) chips there.
"I will be asking President Xi, a Leader of extraordinary distinction, to 'open up' China so that these brilliant people can work their magic," he said in post on Truth Social.
Trump asked Huang at the last minute to join the trip, said a source familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity, and he had not figured on an initial list of travelling executives provided by the White House this week.
Huang was spotted boarding Air Force One during a refuelling halt in Alaska, with Trump due to arrive in Beijing late on Wednesday ahead of meetings with Xi that will include a banquet and a tour of UNESCO heritage site Temple of Heaven.
Apart from trade, the talks will cover a host of sensitive subjects from the Iran war to U.S. arms sales to Taiwan, the democratically governed island claimed by China.
Trump is widely expected to encourage China to convince Tehran to make a deal with Washington to end the conflict, though he has said he did not think he would need its help.
As Trump rubbed shoulders with Huang and Elon Musk aboard Air Force One, Bessent embarked on his latest round of trade negotiations with Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng at a reception room at South Korea's Incheon airport.
Both sides are eager to maintain a truce struck last October in which Trump suspended triple-digit tariffs on Chinese goods and Xi backed away from choking global supplies of rare earths.
They are also expected to agree to forums to support mutual trade and investment, while Washington is eager to sell Boeing airplanes, American agriculture and energy to China to reduce a trade deficit that has irked Trump, U.S. officials have said.
Beijing wants the U.S. to ease curbs on exports of chipmaking equipment and advanced semiconductors.
But Trump enters the talks with a significantly weakened hand say analysts. Courts have hemmed in his ability to levy tariffs on Chinese and other international exports at will.
Trump has vowed to build back those tariffs using remaining legal authorities.
Though the Chinese economy has faltered, Xi does not face comparable economic or political pressure.
"Given last year's trade war, keeping the status quo, rather than escalating, is already good news," said Liu Qian, founder and CEO of Wusawa Advisory, a geopolitical and business advisory firm, based in Beijing.
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European leaders gathered in Dublin on Thursday, 12 November, for the ninth European Political Community (EPC) summit, with security, defence and energy high on the agenda. Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev held talks focused on peace, trade and regional cooperation.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres delivered a stark warning at this year's COP31 summit, saying the climate crisis iss advancing faster than governments' efforts to contain it.
Iran will not let a single particle of its enriched nuclear material leave the country, and any new U.S. attack would be met with strikes on distant American bases, Iranian security chief Mohsen Rezaei has said.
Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang is stepping down amid reports linking him to a woman suspected by U.S. authorities of spying for China, throwing the future of the $4 trillion chipmaker into uncertainty.
Four million workers across Spain joined a general strike on Wednesday over the country’s deepening housing crisis, unions said, bringing disruption to factories, ports, shops and public transport just weeks before a snap general election.
A consortium of Türkiye’s Limak and Qatar’s HBK Contracting has won an international tender to build and operate a new airport terminal in Bukhara, Uzbekistan, under a 23-year public-private partnership, with the project potentially costing up to $300 million.
Spain’s parliament has approved a government package aimed at easing the country’s housing crisis, a day after workers staged the first general strike in 14 years over soaring housing costs.
Here's your AnewZ Technology Daily Brief for the 13th of November. This week, a Microsoft outage hit Australian agencies, Google restricted mapping data in South Korea, a lawsuit targeted advanced AI development, and Nvidia faced a leadership crisis after Jensen Huang's resignation.
Microsoft struggled to restore its services on Friday after a major outage disrupted Outlook, Teams and Copilot across the United States and Asia-Pacific region.
President Vladimir Putin agreed on Thursday to let European representatives join the next round of Ukraine peace talks while the United States continues to work towards what could become the largest prisoner exchange of the Russia-Ukraine war.
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