Pacific leaders, including China’s Xi Jinping, adopted a joint declaration on trade and investment at a major summit in South Korea on Saturday. But the leader of a global power, Donald Trump, is conspicuously absent.
The US president departed South Korea on Thursday, shortly after a landmark meeting with the Chinese president that appeared to calm the lingering trade tensions between the world’s two largest economies.
President Trump chose to skip the annual summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Council, which brings together countries that account for more than half of global trade, and Mr Xi was thrust into the spotlight by calling for unity and cooperation and proposing a global body to govern artificial intelligence.
Despite his absence, President Trump’s protectionist trade policies and tough global tariffs have cast a shadow over the two-day event in Gyeongju. U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent represented Trump during the talks.
Twenty-one economies on both sides of the Pacific signed the Gyeongju Declaration, pledging cooperation for economic recovery and growth. Leaders also adopted AI initiatives and frameworks to respond to demographic changes due to a declining birthrate and aging population.
“The world is experiencing rapid changes not seen in 100 years,” President Xi said in his opening remarks at the forum on Friday. “The more turbulent times become, the more we must stand together.”
“The door to China’s opening up will not be closed, it will only be opened wider,” Xi said.
Decisions made in Gyeongju are non-binding, and leaders have faced difficulty reaching agreement in the past, including on thorny issues such as Russia’s war in Ukraine. But the main focus of this year’s forum was on strengthening supply chains and fostering cooperation as economies around the world reel from President Trump’s tariff offensive.
In their declaration, the leaders acknowledged that “the global trading system continues to face significant challenges,” and said they would therefore “support efforts to ensure resilient supply chains” and “create new engines of growth” through digital innovation, including AI.
“We are at a critical turning point in the rapidly changing global economic order,” South Korean President and APEC Chairman Lee Jae-myung said in a speech at the summit on Friday. “Only cooperation and unity can ensure a better future for us.”
Lee also met with President Xi Jinping, who is on a state visit to South Korea, in the first summit meeting between the two leaders. According to South Korea’s presidential office, the two sides discussed ways to expand cooperation and advance the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.
Ahead of the meeting, Li said relations between Seoul and China “have not yet fully recovered” and said they needed to “find a way to help each other.” Li said he hopes China will play a role in promoting peace on the peninsula.
North Korea has insisted that talk of denuclearization is a “pipe dream” that will never come true. South Korea’s Vice Foreign Minister Park Myung-ho accused South Korea of lacking “common sense” for refusing to recognize North Korea as a nuclear-armed state, state-run Korean Central News Agency reported on Saturday.
Among Xi’s high-profile meetings on the sidelines of APEC was one with Sanae Takaichi, Japan’s new prime minister. Sanae Takaichi is a staunch conservative who has criticized China’s growing military presence in the region and called for cooperation with Taiwan, an autonomous island that Beijing claims as its own.
Xi told Gao Shi that China was ready to “work with Japan towards constructive and stable bilateral relations that meet the demands of the new era,” according to China’s state-run Xinhua News Agency.
“I look forward to maintaining communication with you and jointly promoting the development of China-Japan relations on the right track,” Xi said.
Takaichi faced a difficult balance in his meeting with President Xi. China remains Japan’s largest trading partner, and Takaichi inherited a country facing a growing economic crisis.
He told reporters after the meeting that China and Japan had agreed to build a “mutually beneficial strategic relationship.” But Takaichi said he also expressed concerns to Xi about sensitive issues such as China’s restrictions on rare earth exports, China’s activities in the East China Sea and the detention of Japanese nationals in China.
“We also called on China to resume imports of Japanese beef and seafood,” she said.
The meeting was in stark contrast to the warm friendship Takaichi and Trump displayed in Tokyo just days earlier, when the two allies were entering a “new golden age” of relations. Takaichi and Trump showed their close bond with smiles, fist pumps and jokes.
For Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who is embroiled in an escalating trade war with President Trump, the meeting with Xi marked a “turning point” in bilateral relations, his office said.
In an earlier speech that echoed Mr. Xi and Mr. Li’s speeches at APEC, Mr. Carney told the forum that the world was “facing a new crossroads in history.”
“Our world is undergoing one of the most profound changes since the fall of the Berlin Wall,” he said. “That old world of steadily expanding trade and investment liberalization is over.”
Mr. Carney had been seeking to reset relations between Canada and China after years of souring and diplomatic friction. Trade negotiations with the United States, Canada’s largest trading partner, have stalled, and Mr. Carney told the APEC summit that Canada aims to double its non-U.S. exports over the next 10 years in a bid to diversify away from the United States.
According to the Prime Minister’s Office, the two leaders “affirmed their determination to renew the relationship in a pragmatic and constructive way” and discussed a framework to “deepen cooperation in a wide range of areas, from clean energy and conventional energy to agriculture, manufacturing, climate change and international finance.”
Carney also accepted an invitation to visit China, and the two leaders “instructed officials to move quickly to resolve outstanding trade issues and frustrations.”
Carney told reporters on Saturday that he apologized to President Trump for a political ad that infuriated the president and forced him to end trade talks with Canada.
“I apologized to the president,” Carney said when asked by reporters about the issue on Saturday. “The president was offended by that ad. It’s not my job to run that ad. So I apologized to the president.”
The ad, released last month by the government of Ontario, Canada, featured audio of a speech by former U.S. President Ronald Reagan criticizing tariffs on foreign goods.
