The presidents of China and the United States are considering meeting in Vietnam on February 27 and 28, according to a source familiar with the discussions.
The source said President Xi Jinping and his US counterpart Donald Trump may meet in the coastal city of Da Nang, where they are expected to continue pushing to resolve the trade dispute between the two nations.
The meeting was mentioned by Trump when a Chinese trade delegation was in Washington this week for talks. Trump said he looked forward to meeting Xi once or twice to conclude a trade deal.
No details of arrangements for those meetings were revealed, and the Chinese foreign ministry said only that Xi was willing to keep in touch with Trump through various means.
US and China may seek to extend trade war truce before final deal
Washington is also preparing for a second summit between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in late February.
Trump said he would announce the date and location for the meeting with Kim early next week, possibly during his State of the Union address scheduled for Tuesday. Several locations were suggested for the summit, including Da Nang.
Earlier, when asked if he would consider meeting Xi during his next visit to Asia, Trump said he was “thinking about it”.
“There’s a possibility we’ll meet somewhere,” Trump told reporters on Friday. “Whether it’s there, I’m over in a certain location I’ll be over in a certain location as you know.”
The Wall Street Journal reported that during the meeting at the Oval Office on Thursday, the Chinese delegation proposed a meeting with Xi on the island of Hainan after Trump’s summit with Kim.
Jin Canrong, the associate dean of international studies at Renmin University in Beijing, said Beijing would prefer to host the Xi-Trump summit on Chinese territory.
“It’s a bilateral issue which has nothing to do with a third country,” Jin said, “China has made great compromises on trade issues and if Trump does travel to East Asia, it would be ideal if he could drop by in Hainan.”
Jin also noted that Beijing may not want to complicate the trade talks by discussing North Korean denuclearization, where little progress has been made since Trump and Kim’s first meeting in June.
Despite sharp falls in bilateral trade last year because of the UN sanctions, China remains North Korea’s top trading partner and a close ally,
Kim’s most recent meeting with Xi earlier last month, his fourth over the past year, was seen by some observers as a sign that Kim may be seeking to use his links with Beijing as a bargaining chip in his next meeting with Trump.
Meanwhile, both China and the United States remained upbeat about the prospects of settling their trade disputes after the latest round of negotiations ended on Thursday. China said both sides had a clear road map for future talks.
Following a meeting between Trump and Xi in December, the two nations agreed to suspend further tariff increases for 90 days until March 1. But the US has threatened to raise tariffs from 10 to 25 per cent on US$200 billion worth of Chinese goods if they cannot reach a deal to address its long-term trade grievances by that date.
Chinese diplomatic observers said a framework that would extend the ceasefire could be reached between the two leaders in their upcoming meeting, or they may even agree to lower some of the existing tariffs.