Leaders of Pacific countries and territories, including China’s Xi Jinping, adopted a joint declaration on trade and investment at a major summit in South Korea Saturday. But the leader of one global powerhouse is conspicuously absent: Donald Trump.
The US president flew out of South Korea Thursday, moments after his landmark meeting with his Chinese counterpart that appeared to de-escalate the protracted trade conflict between the world’s two largest economies.
With Trump choosing to skip the annual summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation – which groups together countries accounting for more than half of global trade – Xi stepped into the limelight by calling for unity, cooperation and proposing a global body to govern artificial intelligence.
Despite his absence, Trump’s protectionist trade policies and punishing global tariffs have loomed over the two-day event in the city of Gyeongju. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent stood in for Trump during the discussions.
The grouping of 21 economies on both sides of the Pacific signed the “Gyeongju Declaration,” which included commitments to cooperate on economic recovery and growth. The leaders also adopted an AI initiative and a framework to respond to demographic changes caused by low birth rates and aging populations.
“The world is undergoing rapid changes unseen in a century,” Xi told the forum in his opening remarks Friday. “The more turbulent the times are, the more we must stand together in solidarity.”
“China’s door to openness will not close; it will only open wider,” Xi said.
Decisions made in Gyeongju are non-binding — and leaders have faced difficulty reaching consensus in the past including on thorny issues like Russia’s war in Ukraine. But a major focus for the forum this year was on strengthening supply chains and encouraging cooperation as economies worldwide reel from Trump’s tariff offensive.
In their declaration, the leaders acknowledged that “the global trading system continues to face significant challenges,” and as su ch they would “support efforts to ensure resilient supply chains” and “create new drivers of growth” through digital innovations, including AI.
Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi shakes hands with Chinese President Xi Jinping ahead of their talks in Gyeongju, South Korea, October 31, 2025 in this photo distributed by Kyodo. – Kyodo/Reuters
“We are standing at a critical inflection point with a rapidly changing global economic order,” South Korean president and APEC chair Lee Jae Myung said in his address to the summit Friday. “Only cooperation and solidarity can surely lead us to a better future.”
Lee will sit down for talks with Xi, who is on a state visit to South Korea, in the first summit meeting between the two leaders. On the agenda are discussions on the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula and regional peace and stability.
Ahead of the talks, Lee said the relationship between Seoul and Beijing has “not completely recovered yet” and there was a need to “find the path for helping one another.” He looked forward to China playing a role in promoting peace on the peninsula, Lee said.
North Korea called talk of denuclearization a “pipedream” that will never be realized. The country’s Vice Foreign Minister Pak Myong Ho accused South Korea of lacking “common sense” for refusing to acknowledge Pyongyang as a nuclear-armed state, the state-run Korea Central News Agency reported Saturday.
Among the high-profile meetings Xi had on the sidelines of APEC was with Japan’s newly installed Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, a staunch conservative who has criticized China’s growing military presence in the region and called for cooperation with Taiwan, the self-ruled island that Beijing claims as its own.
Xi told Takaichi that China was ready to “work with Japan for constructive, stable bilateral ties that meet requirements of the new era,” Chinese state news agency Xinhua reported.
“I aim to maintain communication with you and therefore jointly promote the development of China-Japan relations along the right track,” Xi said.
Takaichi faced a tough balancing act in her meeting with Xi. China remains Japan’s largest trading partner and Takaichi inherited a country facing mounting economic woes.
She told reporters after the meeting that China and Japan agreed to build a “strategic mutually beneficial relationship.” But Takaichi said she also expressed concerns to Xi on sensitive issues including Chinese export controls on rare earths, China’s activity in the East China Sea, and the detention of Japanese nationals in China.
“I also asked China to resume Japanese beef and seafood imports,” she said.
The meeting appeared in stark contrast to the warm camaraderie showed by Takaichi and Trump in Tokyo just days before, when the two allies had embarked on a “new golden age” of relations. Takaichi and Trump demonstrated a close bond complete with smiles, fist pumps and jokes.
For Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who is involved in an escalating trade war with Trump, meeting with Xi marked a “turning point” in their relationship, according to his office.
In an earlier speech that echoed Xi and Lee’s addresses to APEC, Carney told the forum that the world was “facing another hinge moment in history.”
“Our world is undergoing one of the most profound shifts since the fall of the Berlin Wall,” he said. “That old world… of steady expansion of liberalized trade and investment… that world is gone.”
Carney had been looking for a reset of Canada-China relations after years of worsening ties and diplomatic rows. Trade negotiations with the US, Canada’s biggest trading partner, are at a dead end, and Carney said at the APEC summit that he was aiming to double non-US exports over the next decade in an effort to diversify away from the US.
Carney and Xi “affirmed their commitment to renewing the relationship between their two countries in a pragmatic and constructive way” and discussed a framework “to deepen cooperation across a range of areas – from clean and conventional energy, to agriculture, manufacturing, climate change, and international finance,” the prime minister’s office said.
Carney also accepted an invitation to visit China and both leaders “directed their officials to move quickly to resolve outstanding trade issues and irritants.”
CNN’s Joyce Jiang and Yoonjung Seo contributed to this story
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