BEIJING (The Thursday Times) — China said on Thursday it was in contact with other parties about a possible meeting between President Xi Jinping, US President Donald Trump, and Russian President Vladimir Putin at next week’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Shenzhen.
“China is in communication with relevant parties regarding a meeting between the three heads of state. If there is further information, we will release it in a timely way,” foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning told a regular press briefing in Beijing.
A day earlier, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio raised a three-way meeting in a phone call with Foreign Minister Wang Yi. The State Department said the two sides agreed that meetings between leaders were important for advancing peace and denuclearisation, including at a possible trilateral meeting with Russia. Beijing’s account of the call, carried by Chinese state media, called it positive and constructive but did not mention a meeting with Russia.
Asked whether Wang and Rubio had discussed nuclear arms control, and whether it could be on the agenda in Shenzhen, Mao said she had nothing to add to China’s readout. Beijing has long resisted joining arms control talks with Washington and Moscow, arguing that its arsenal is far smaller than theirs.
Putin is reported to want to use any meeting to discuss ending the war in Ukraine. On Thursday he received US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner at the Kremlin, after two days of US-mediated talks between Russian and Ukrainian delegations in Abu Dhabi.
“Stop fabricating”
Mao also pushed back at US security concerns raised by the Nvidia affair. Asked whether the scandal would hurt relations before the summit, she said the United States should “stop fabricating the ‘Chinese spy’ narratives as a pretext for imposing technology restrictions”, adding that China’s progress in science and technology relied on “independent innovation and open cooperation”.
Jensen Huang stepped down as Nvidia’s chief executive on Thursday. He has admitted an extramarital affair with Alice Huang, a former executive at Singapore-based Megaspeed whom US officials are reported to suspect of working for Chinese intelligence. China has called the claims groundless. Megaspeed said on Thursday that it took its obligations under US export control laws “extremely seriously”.
Mao said China and the United States were in close communication about contacts between their leaders, and that Beijing was ready to work with Washington to deliver on the “important common understandings” reached by the two presidents and build “a constructive relationship of strategic stability”.
Asked about procurement notices showing that a university in Xi’an had bought Nvidia H200 chips, which are restricted under US export controls, she said she was not familiar with the details and that China opposed the United States “overstretching the concept of national security”. She also said she was not familiar with reports that Alice Huang was living in Beijing.
Shenzhen next week
Trump travels to Shenzhen next week for the APEC summit, his second trip to China this year after a visit to Beijing in May, when Huang was a late addition to his delegation. Rubio and Wang also discussed Xi’s planned visit to Florida for the G20 summit in December.
The summit comes as Washington has asked Beijing to press Iran to end the war in the Gulf, and days after Xi said Taiwan’s “reunification” with China was the Communist Party’s historic mission. On Thursday Mao also rejected a statement by G7 foreign ministers on Chinese activity in the waters east of Taiwan, saying it grossly interfered in China’s internal affairs.
