Washington — President Trump arrived in Gyeongju, South Korea, on Wednesday for the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit and his highly anticipated meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Trump will address the summit on Wednesday morning local time and will meet Xi a day later. He is also expected to meet Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at some point as the microchip giant. partners with the Department of Energy to build an artificial intelligence supercomputer and pushes for more access to the Chinese market.
The stop marks the last leg of his Asia tour, after visits to Malaysia and Japan on a five-day tour that has largely focused on trade and economic links in the South Pacific. Trump seeks to consolidate trade agreements and extract tariffs from other countries. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Sunday that extra 100% tariffs that Trump had threatened with Chinese products were “effectively off the table” after a two-day meeting with a Chinese negotiator.
Gyeongju, with a population of around 250,000 in southeastern Korea, is located on the opposite side of the country from Seoul, the country’s capital, and is therefore further away from neighboring North Korea. Trump has said he would be willing to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during his trip, but no such meeting has been planned. In Trump’s first term, he became the first sitting president to visit North Koreaa trip that occurred after he extended an invitation to kim on social networks.
APEC is a regional economic group with 21 member countries around the Pacific Rim, and promoting free trade is an important component of the forum, despite Trump’s push to impose higher tariffs on many member countries. APEC members include China, Mexico, Russia, Singapore, South Korea and Vietnam.
The president is seeking to close a trade deal with South Korea, the United States’ sixth largest trading partner. Over the summer, Mr. Trump announced a framework agreement That means the United States imposes 15% tariffs on South Korean products, while South Korea invests billions in American industry and opens its market to American cars. Bessent told reporters that the deal with South Korea is unlikely to be resolved this week, but it is close.
Mark Schiefelbein/AP
Before leaving Tokyo, Trump also signed a trade agreement with new Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi on Tuesday binding 15% tariffs on imported Japanese goods, down from the 25% initially threatened by the president. Japan also pledged $550 billion in investments in American industry. And the president announced trade frameworks with Malaysia, Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand early in the trip.
Trump’s meeting with China’s Xi could be tense, as the two world powers have clashed over trade and tariffs for months.
The president is pressing Xi to loosen a series of tough restrictions on the export of rare earth elements, which are essential for everything from computer chips to the aerospace industry, threatening 100% tariffs starting Saturday unless Beijing backs down.
The trade war has also led China to cut purchases of American soybeans, hurting American farmers, although Bessent said Sunday that wait for the soy boycott to end. And Mr. Trump needs chinese approval for a deal to transfer TikTok’s U.S. operations from Beijing-based parent company ByteDance.
Nicholas Burns, the US ambassador to China during the Biden era, told CBS News chief White House correspondent Nancy Cordes that Wednesday’s meeting is “very important,” calling the trade war a “test of wills” between the world’s two largest economies.
“China is now the most important competitor, the adversary of the United States around the world. It will be that in the future,” Burns said. “So the stakes are high, because we have a lot of issues where we compete with China.”
