Marco Rubio Slams Trump-Xi Jinping Meeting Amid Rising US-China Trade Tensions

Rubio, the US Secretary of State, on Friday, added that it is likely that a meeting between the President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping is going to take place but that no date has been yet confirmed.

Rubio has said this during his talk to reporters in the margins of the East Asia Summit and ASEAN Regional Forum meeting in Malaysia. His remarks came after he held a meeting with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi lasting close to an hour, the first face-to-face sit-down with the two officials since Rubio was elected to office in January.

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Rubio called the meeting very constructive, and he added that there are still issues between the two sides. The statement is made in the context of the increase in tension due to the Washington new tariff attack.

The discussions are made towards a period when China and the US relations have been tensed, with Beijing expressing concerns of the high American tariffs reinstitution. This week being the latest period, Trump administration has applied new round of tariffs, starting at 25 per cent and up to 40 per cent, to imports of a variety of Asian nations such as Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Cambodia, Myanmar, and Laos.

Wang in turn condemned US duties as uncharacteristic unilateral bullying behaviour on his visit to Kuala Lumpur. He advised his counterparts in Malaysia, Thailand and Cambodia that the tariffs were triggering the weakness in the global freer trade system and the reliability of production and supply chains.

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“We believe that Southeast Asian countries have the ability to cope with complex situations... and safeguard their own interests,” he said, according to the Chinese foreign ministry.

The visit by Rubio seeks to intensify US involvement in Indo-Pacific region as concerns between them and China intensify. He also criticized the Chinese sponsorship of Russia on the war on Ukraine, saying China had “been willing to help them as much as they can without getting caught.”

During his visit to Malaysia, Rubio also engaged his Japanese and South Korean counterparts as well as Thailand, Cambodia and Indonesia. The US State Department stated that his meetings with Japan and South Korea covered the enhancement of their “essential trilateral alliance,” especially in such aspects as critical technologies and supply chains resilience.

In the meantime, rising trade tension has scared ASEAN foreign ministers. In a joint communique they said without naming the US specifically that unilateral tariffs were counterproductive and threatened to fuel global economic fragmentation. They also supported again the need to have an equitable and open trading system that is multilateral in nature and showed support to having a stronger trade relationship with new and developing partners.

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