APEC closes in Peru with China’s President Xi front and center

LIMA, Peru — After two days of meetings in Lima that rarely ventured beyond platitudes in discussing the strategies of the region’s major economies, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum wrapped up Saturday with a spirit of detente that many fear the annual summit may not see again for four years.

The 21 leaders from economies bordering the Pacific, including U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping, descended on Peru this week at a time when America’s incoming president, Donald Trump, has vowed to withdraw the U.S. from its leadership of a global free trade agenda.

Few could help noting that Biden’s late entrance to the traditional APEC family photo Saturday lent itself to political metaphor, as the rest of the leaders prepared to pose onstage before looking around to find Biden missing.

They tittered for five awkward minutes before a seemingly dazed Biden emerged and took his place in the far back corner, standing between Thailand’s 38-year-old Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra and Vietnam President Luong Cuong. Descending the stage, Biden briefly reached for Shinawatra’s hand to steady himself.

Chinese President Xi scored the best spot in the house, front and center beside the host, Peruvian President Dina Boluarte. He draped himself in the banner of globalization this week, inaugurating a massive $1.3 billion megaport in Peru that promises to become South America’s biggest shipping hub and using his speeches to reject protectionism.

In Xi’s summit address, delivered by one of his ministers, the Chinese leader urged APEC members to “tear down the walls impeding the flow of trade,” and criticized tariffs — which Trump threatens to levy on Chinese imports — as “going back in history.”

For the annual photo-op, leaders all wore bark-hued wool scarves from Peru — in the APEC tradition of posing in some garb representative of the host country. While conference organizers typically position leaders in alphabetical order for the family photo, arrangements have varied over the years.

Reporters shouted questions as Biden left the stage Friday, asking how he felt about this being his last APEC summit — and one of his last major global events as president.

Biden had hoped that APEC — along with the Group of 20 summit in Rio de Janeiro, where he heads Sunday — would have capped his decade-long political career with a flurry of productive diplomacy and swaggering proclamations of America’s force on the world stage.

But with his party’s stinging defeat in the U.S. election and the future of the U.S.-China rivalry uncertain, there was little he could accomplish in Lima.

He sought to cement alliances that could be upended by a Trump administration. He expressed concern to the leaders of South Korea and Japan about what he called “dangerous and destabilizing cooperation” between North Korea and Russia.

Later Saturday Biden and Xi sat down at a long table later Saturday for their third and final meeting of Biden’s tenure.

Xi told Biden that his nation was “ready to work with a new administration to maintain communication.”

Biden also struck a conciliatory tone, saying that such in-person talks helped “ensure that competition between our two countries will not veer into conflict.”

Xi cautioned that a stable China-U.S. relationship was critical not only to the two nations but to the “future and destiny of humanity.”

“Make the wise choice,” he cautioned. “Keep exploring the right way for two major countries to get along well with each other.”

Without mentioning Trump’s name, Xi appeared to signal his concern that the incoming president’s protectionist rhetoric on the campaign trail could send the U.S.-China relationship into another valley.

“China is ready to work with a new U.S. administration to maintain communication, expand cooperation and manage differences so as to strive for a steady transition of the China-U.S. relationship for the benefit of the two peoples,” Xi said through an interpreter.

Xi, who is firmly entrenched atop China’s political hierarchy, spoke forcefully in his brief remarks before reporters. Biden, who is winding down more than 50 years of public service, talked in broader brushstrokes about where the relationship between the two countries has gone.

He reflected not just on the past four years but on the decades the two have known each other.

“We haven’t always agreed, but our conversations have always been candid and always been frank. We’ve never kidded one another,” Biden said. “These conversations prevent miscalculations, and they ensure the competition between our two countries will not veer into conflict.”

Biden urged Xi to dissuade North Korea from further deepening its support for Russia’s war on Ukraine. The leaders, with top aides surrounding them, gathered around a long rectangle of tables in an expansive conference room at a Lima hotel.

They had much to discuss, including China’s indirect support for Russia, human rights issues, technology and Taiwan, the self-ruled democracy that Beijing claims as its own. On artificial intelligence, the two agreed on the need to maintain human control over the decision to use nuclear weapons and more broadly improve safety and international cooperation of the rapidly expanding technology.

There’s much uncertainty about what lies ahead in the U.S.-China relationship under Trump, who campaigned promising to levy 60% tariffs on Chinese imports.

Already, many American companies, including Nike and eyewear retailer Warby Parker, have been diversifying their sourcing away from China. Shoe brand Steve Madden says it plans to cut imports from China by as much as 45% next year.

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