LIMA, PERU — Chinese President Xi Jinping presented himself as a defender of “multilateralism and an open economy,” Saturday at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Forum in Lima, Peru.
In a speech just hours ahead of his meeting with U.S. President Joe Biden on the sidelines of APEC, Xi urged leaders to “tear down the walls impeding the flow of trade, investment, technology and services.”
Foreign diplomatic sources who spoke under the condition of anonymity told VOA they are concerned that the U.S. would turn more protectionist and isolationist under the incoming Trump administration. President-elect Donald Trump will be inaugurated in January.
Under his first term as president, Trump withdrew from various multilateral agreements including the Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade pact and the Paris Climate Accord. He imposed punitive tariffs on China, largely kept in place by the Biden administration, and ramped up trade pressure with other U.S. trading partners including Europe and Japan.
During his 2024 campaign, Trump vowed to place tariffs of up to 60% on all Chinese imports, and 10% to 20% on goods from the rest of the world.
Xi’s narrative on Beijing’s role as global defender of free trade loomed over his summit with Biden. The meeting — held at the Chinese delegation’s hotel in Lima rather than on neutral ground as is customary — is their last in-person engagement while Biden is in office and part of Biden’s farewell tour on the world stage.
The White House said that because the U.S. hosted China at the Woodside summit on the sidelines of the APEC meeting in California last year, Beijing chose the location this year.
The leaders held their first meeting in 2022 in Bali, at a neutral venue on the sidelines of the G20 summit hosted by Indonesia.
At the summit, Biden is set to reiterate his “longstanding concern” over China’s “unfair trade policies and non-market economic practices” that hurt American workers, said a senior administration official who spoke ahead of the meeting under the condition of anonymity.
The president also will be relaying to Xi his “deep concern” over Beijing’s support for Moscow’s war against Ukraine and the deployment of North Korean troops to aid Russia, as well as Beijing’s increased military activities around Taiwan and the South China Sea.
Additionally, Biden is set to warn China over its alleged role in hacking private telecommunications providers used by U.S. government and presidential campaign officials, national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters Thursday aboard Air Force One en route to Lima.
“We have made clear over time that we will respond when we see actions taken, in terms of cyberattacks, cyber espionage, cyber intrusions,” Sullivan said.
Complicated rivalry
Biden has called Xi a “dictator” in the past, while Xi has accused the U.S. of being the “biggest source of chaos” in the world. But both leaders have emphasized the importance of stability, and in the past four years they largely have succeeded in managing the complicated rivalry.
In their summit last year, Biden and Xi agreed to restart military-to-military communications, in part to manage potential tensions surrounding Taiwan and the South China Sea.
At APEC, Xi championed a “new impetus” toward an “open Asia-Pacific economy” and supported the group’s efforts to move faster toward achieving the Free Trade Area of the Asia-Pacific, a proposed regional free trade agreement between the 21 APEC member economies.
China is a member of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, the largest regional free trade agreement involving 15 countries in Asia and the Pacific. The U.S. is not a member of RCEP.
In 2021, Beijing applied for membership in the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership. The regional free trade pact initially began as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, promoted in 2015 by then-U.S. President Barack Obama.
Trump withdrew the U.S. from TPP in 2017. Following Washington’s departure, the TPP eventually became CPTPP – an 11-country bloc that now constitutes one of the largest free trade areas in the world.
The Biden administration in 2022 launched the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, which includes a dozen Indo-Pacific countries. There are no market access or tariff reduction provisions in the framework — trade incentives desired by countries in the region.
IPEF is unlikely to continue in its current form under Trump, said Zack Cooper, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
“But the reality is that many countries in the region have been pretty disappointed by IPEF and so if they see it either go away or change, I don’t think they’ll be panicked about that possibility,” he told VOA.
Sullivan pushes back
Xi began his South American tour by inaugurating a mega port in Peru, a $1.3 billion investment by Beijing as it seeks to expand trade and influence on the continent.
Sullivan pushed back against the narrative that Beijing has overtaken Washington as the world’s main backer of development and infrastructure financing.
“Every time we fly to South America or Africa, the press writes the story: ‘China is doing a lot; America is doing a little,'” he said in response to VOA’s question.
“And then you look at the numbers behind it — the total stock of American investment in Latin America and the Caribbean — and you compare that to what China is doing. We are, across our private sector and now backed up by tools like the Development Finance Corporation, investing in a wide range of technology, infrastructure, energy, health, and other projects and are an incredibly important player,” he said, noting that the U.S. is investing heavily in Peru, $6.6 billion in 2023.
From Lima, Biden heads to the G20 summit in Rio de Janeiro on Sunday, with a brief stop in the Brazilian Amazon to deliver remarks on climate change.
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