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00:00So President Trump, as we mentioned, is waking up in Washington this morning following that summit with Chinese leader Xi
00:04Jinping.
00:05He talked to Fox News about the trip, calling Taiwan, quote, the most important issue.
00:10But here's more of what he said.
00:11Should the people of Taiwan feel more or less secure after your meetings with President Xi?
00:19Neutral. Neutral.
00:20Has the policy changed at all?
00:22No, nothing's changed.
00:23The U.S. policy.
00:23No, nothing's changed. I will say this.
00:25I'm not looking to have somebody go independent and, you know, we're supposed to travel 9,500 miles to fight
00:33a war.
00:33I'm not looking for that.
00:35I want them to cool down.
00:37I want China to cool down.
00:38But you're waiting on approving billions of dollars of weapons for Taiwan.
00:43Is that moving forward?
00:44Well, I haven't approved it yet.
00:46We're going to see what happens.
00:48What are you looking for?
00:48I may do it. I may not do it.
00:50What's your hinge point?
00:51Well, I'm not going to say that, but I may do it. I may not do it.
00:54But we're not looking to have wars.
00:56And if you kept it the way it is, I think China's going to be okay with that.
01:01But we're not looking to have somebody say, let's go independent because the United States is backing us.
01:07No substantive agreements from that summit have been announced yet, but President Trump did invite President Xi to Washington in
01:12September.
01:13Joining us now is Stephen Engel, Bloomberg's chief North Asia correspondent.
01:15He is in Beijing.
01:16And Bloomberg White House correspondent Courtney Subramanian is with us as well.
01:19Stephen, let me start with you and have you react to what we heard there from the president in that
01:22conversation with Brett Baer of Fox News.
01:25This was a signal moment from that summit, the remarks the president and Xi made about Taiwan.
01:29Indeed, it resonated over the course of these two and a half days in Beijing.
01:33Talk about how both sides here are shaping that message as President Trump makes his way back to Washington.
01:40And we begin to sort of process what indeed took place over the course of the summit.
01:45Yeah, I think it's remarkable that the two presidents did talk at length, at least according to Donald Trump.
01:52They talked at length about Taiwan.
01:54And keep in mind, coming into this summit, as we did a lot of previews, we talked to a lot
01:57of people here in Beijing about what do we think the Chinese side will really want?
02:02What's their deliverable?
02:03We debated ad nauseum about what potentially could be the U.S. deliverables, especially with that huge 17 to 18
02:10executive entourage that came with Donald Trump, including Jensen Huang and Elon Musk and Tim Cook and others.
02:16But on the geopolitical front, what did China want?
02:20And it was really boiled down to the three T's trade, including tariffs, tech, including those accelerators from NVIDIA and
02:29then Taiwan.
02:29Well, the U.S. courts kind of took care of a lot of the hot button issues on the tariff
02:34side.
02:35Tech, it wasn't really discussed, according to Jameson Greer, the U.S. trade representative, in an exclusive interview we had
02:41in this room.
02:42In fact, just yesterday, he said it wasn't even discussed during their two and a half hour talk in the
02:47Great Hall of the People.
02:48So that really left Taiwan and clearly Xi Jinping issuing his most blunt, you know, warning, if you will, to
02:57a U.S. president about Taiwan that if it is not handled well, it could lead to a very dangerous
03:02situation.
03:02And clearly that is something that the Chinese side wanted to get across from the get go, because even before
03:09that two and a half hour bilateral first meeting between those two gentlemen in the Great Hall of the People,
03:14the Chinese state media put out Xi Jinping's statements, not even giving the U.S. side the opportunity to do
03:22any kind of reaction to that.
03:24And also, when Donald Trump was finally asked about it, he stayed very uncharacteristically quiet on the subject.
03:33So there was a lot discussed, though.
03:36Courtney, I thought that was so interesting that the Chinese put out that statement stating that they had issued their
03:42stance on Taiwan before that meeting had even responded, before the meeting had even ended.
03:46And to Stephen's point, the U.S. didn't really push back.
03:49We didn't see a competing statement come out right away from the White House.
03:52We also, in these interviews, President Trump seems to have received the Chinese message.
03:57Is it clear that China received something similar from the U.S.?
04:00And what was America's message on this issue?
04:03Because it seems to me the response to that normally would be to issue approval for that arms package Taiwan
04:09has been waiting for the president's signature on.
04:11That still hasn't happened.
04:12The president said in this interview that he's going to hold it as kind of a bargaining chip for all
04:16these other things he's trying to get out of China.
04:18Why not just sign that deal and keep the status quo if that's what the president says he wants?
04:24Yeah, it's a good point.
04:26I mean, the U.S. has been insistent that, you know, the status quo remains in place.
04:31Nothing's changed in policy.
04:34But the president's comments were, you know, remarkable yesterday to Fox News.
04:40He, as you mentioned, called it, you know, a chip to be leveraged.
04:46And I think, you know, that signaled he may hold off on approving that deal until Xi's visit in September,
04:53which in itself would just be a win for Beijing, right?
04:57This is something that allows them to buy more time and, you know, and keep the U.S. at bay.
05:06And so, again, I think that is a win for China walking away from the summit.
05:13Stephen, I want to go back to sort of what we're waiting for here again.
05:16It's shaping the message, shaping the understanding of what unfolded at the summit, but also waiting for any indications of
05:20what deals might have come out of this.
05:21Just get us up to speed on what we might see, what we're expecting.
05:24I think going into this summit, as you've pointed out, there were these expectations that there might be announcements on
05:29tariffs and trade.
05:29We saw the plane full of tech executives.
05:31Maybe that would have led to some big announcements on some tech deals.
05:35There have been whisperings of sort of how big this Boeing purchase plan is likely to be.
05:40What are you waiting for?
05:41What are the statements you're waiting to see land in your inbox here in the next 24 or 48 hours?
05:47Well, the whole AI infrastructure and build-out story is a global story.
05:52So when Jensen Huang goes up to Anchorage, Alaska, and jumps on board Air Force One to come to Beijing
05:57at the last minute,
05:59after essentially saying that he wasn't going on this trip, but that gave us a lot of indication that perhaps
06:05there was something brewing on the H-200 or the H-20,
06:09even the watered-down accelerator that has already been approved for sale to China.
06:14But it's China, especially on the H-200, that has come out and said, we don't want our companies buying
06:20it right now.
06:20Of course, China is really focusing on indigenous innovation, building out their own chips, and also their own technologies for
06:27their large language models.
06:28But again, clearly the LLMs here in China would love to have the H-200 or those types of chips
06:36from China, from NVIDIA.
06:38But again, nothing was announced.
06:40So maybe that's something that's going to come down the pike later on.
06:45We thought maybe because Elon Musk also made the trip, he's been pushing hard for FSD, full self-driving in
06:51China, technology.
06:52It has not gotten over the regulatory hurdle there, even though they've gotten signals that it's going to come eventually.
06:58He wants robo-taxis in China.
07:00Again, that is not something that it came.
07:02So where we got some deliverables, if you will, were on the agricultural front, probably as a result of Congressman
07:08Steve Daines, who really representing the beef and soybean lobbies.
07:13He's been here several times over the last year making that case.
07:17So there's soybean commitments.
07:19There's beef that's going to be back on Chinese tables after about a 14-month pause because of that tariff
07:25barrage coming from Washington, and maybe corn as well.
07:28So we're waiting for a few more things.
07:30That Boeing jet order, according to Boeing and Donald Trump, was about 200 planes.
07:35The market was expecting 500.
07:37So it sort of fell short.
07:39Yeah, we saw the market very unimpressed with that order yesterday.
07:41We're going to talk about that more a little bit later.
07:43Courtney, I want to talk to you about Iran because our White House team has a story on the term
07:48this morning saying Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi came out with a statement that's a little bit stronger than we've
07:53seen from the Iranians so far,
07:54saying the straits should be open to shipping as soon as possible.
07:58Now, that's something I think a lot of the people in the world are comfortable saying.
08:02It's not really taking a stance.
08:03It's just saying it should be open.
08:05What did President Trump want from China in the way of Iran?
08:08We've got a bit of sound I'm going to play from you, and then I want you to talk about
08:11it.
08:14Every time they make a deal, the next day it's like we didn't have that conversation.
08:22And that's taken place about five times.
08:24There's something wrong with them.
08:25Actually, they're crazy.
08:26And you know what?
08:27Because of that, they cannot have a nuclear weapon.
08:30The president of China agrees with you on that.
08:33He agrees with me on that.
08:34He agrees with me that he wants to see it end.
08:37He'd like to see it end.
08:38He would like to help.
08:40If he wants help, that's great.
08:41But we don't need help.
08:42And you know the problem with help?
08:44When somebody helps you, they always want something on the other side.
08:48So this is very interesting, because the president has been really hard on European
08:52allies for not helping in the strait.
08:54Now he's saying to China, well, we don't really need their help.
08:57Look, China probably doesn't want a nuclear Iran.
08:59I think that's safe to say.
09:01But they seem reticent to get involved.
09:03What did the White House want here?
09:05What can it get out of China?
09:06And why is China staying on the sidelines?
09:10Yeah, I mean, the president, you know, first of all, he needs international support
09:14to help reopen the strait.
09:16That's something that experts have been very clear about.
09:20He said that she agreed with him that the strait should be reopened.
09:25But the two made very little progress on any actual plans to try and reopen that.
09:30He stopped short of leaning on Xi to actually ask Iran.
09:36But he seemed to think that, you know, Xi would follow through on trying to lean on Iran.
09:43He even went as far as to suggest that the U.S. may lift sanctions against Chinese companies
09:48buying Iranian oil as a means to try and move the ball a little bit on this.
09:54But again, I mean, they walked away from this with, you know, little progress on any, you know,
10:03movement on moving this, you know, peace talks forward.
10:07And this Iran largely hung over the summit.
10:10He said they talked a lot about Iran.
10:12This was, of course, supposed to be a summit that, you know, dealt with easing, stabilizing economic relations
10:20and helping him ease some of those inflationary and affordability concerns at home.
10:24But it just went to show that Iran has largely remained a distraction, both for the president
10:32in his relationship with China and on the world stage.
10:35And, you know, I think that he didn't really walk away with any commitments from Xi on Iran.
10:42Stephen, let me have you pick up here.
10:44We're going to have a conversation in a moment just about this nuclear issue and the Russia-Iran
10:48relationship, the China-Iran relationship.
10:49And as a prelude to this summit, we saw the foreign minister of China sitting down with
10:53Iran's foreign minister in Beijing.
10:55Help us understand what China's perspective is on this conflict.
11:00As Christina pointed out, they'd like it to end.
11:02But in real terms, what's the commitment they're prepared to make here to accelerate that or
11:07to catalyze an end of the conflict?
11:11Well, China, you know, has long espoused their policy of non-interference in other people's
11:16affairs.
11:17And I clearly saw that they didn't want to have anything to do with this dialogue during
11:22this summit.
11:23This summit was about getting the relationship and the U.S.-China ties back on track after
11:28what has been a brutal year of tit-for-tat retaliation, tariffs upwards of 145 percent against
11:34China, China retaliating, the levers of leverage, if you will, with the rare earths and export
11:40controls.
11:40There was lots of bad blood.
11:42So Xi Jinping did want to have areas where they could find common ground.
11:48But he kind of jumped the gun as far as getting the narrative out there.
11:52That's why I think them putting out those headlines on Taiwan really crafted the narrative.
12:00And really, it was very muted in their readout, anything about Iran.
12:04They basically mentioned the Middle East.
12:06And even here, the front page of the China Daily here is basically muted commentary.
12:12Did not give any indication that China would help, even though Donald Trump says Xi Jinping
12:18indicated his willingness to help where they can because of their ear in Tehran.
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