Widely characterised as a diplomatic turning point between the world’s two largest economies, President Xi Jinping and President Donald Trump met on the sidelines of the APEC summit on 30 October 2025, in Busan, South Korea. This bilateral summit came at a moment of intense strategic tension — after months of escalating economic confrontation, supply-chain disruptions, and defensive posturing, both sides agreed to de-escalate, recalibrating a fraught U.S.–China relationship into a more managed rivalry.
President Xi noted that “under our joint guidance, China-U.S. relations have remained stable on the whole” and that the two countries, despite “different national conditions … do not always see eye to eye … and it is normal for the two leading economies of the world to have frictions now and then.”[1] In its read-out, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs added that the two parties had conducted “an in-depth exchange of views on important economic and trade issues, and reached consensus on solving various issues.”[2]
