US President Barack Obama and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping have concluded their first summit in California, reportedly making progress on the issue of addressing climate change and dealing with North Korea, but continuing to be divided over the contentious issue of cyber-attacks, intellectual property protection and other outstanding bilateral matters.
The summit, spread over two days in the informal setting of a California desert resort, had the two leaders engaged in eight hours of talks on a whole range of issues.
Obama described the summit deliberations as “terrific”, with his National Security Adviser Tom Donilon terming the discussions “constructive, wide-ranging and quite successful in achieving the goals that we set forth for this meeting”. Xi’s senior foreign policy adviser, Yang Jiechi, went on to say that the two leaders “blazed a new trail” with this first meeting. On confronting global climate change, the two leaders agreed to work together on phase-down of hydrofluorocarbons.
On North Korea, they agreed on continuing to work together on concrete steps to put pressure to halt its nuclear weapons pursuit.
The cybersecurity issue took up most of the discussion on Saturday morning. The specific issue that Obama talked to President Xi is the issue of cyber-enabled economic theft — theft of intellectual property and other kinds of property in the public and private realm in the US by entities based in China, Donilon said, stressing: “What’S critical, I think is that it is now really at the center of the relationship. It is not an adjunct issue, it’s an issue that is very much on the table.”