00:00I've been speaking to Jeff Rabi, he's a former Australian ambassador to China,
00:05about the importance of this face-to-face meeting.
00:08First and foremost, the fact that the leaders are meeting,
00:12this will be the third time in 12 months, a bit under 12 months.
00:17They met in Busan in South Korea on the margins of the APEC meeting last November.
00:25Trump went to Beijing in May.
00:28Xi Jinping is now in Washington.
00:30And there's a very high probability that Trump will go to the APEC leaders' meeting in November in Shenzhen.
00:38And possibly even President Xi will go again for the G20 meeting.
00:43This, to me, is where the real value of what's happening lies,
00:49because these leaders need to be talking to each other, need to be working through some of these issues.
00:54So the fact that they're meeting itself is extremely important.
00:58As for the agenda, well, you've mentioned that there's AI.
01:03They announced this afternoon that there's going to be an extension of what's called the Busan Paws,
01:11or the Trade Truce, which is good.
01:15And there's possibility about the Board of Trade, which was announced during President Trump's visit back in May,
01:24might actually start to do a few things.
01:26And that would be very good, because it would start to lead towards opening up trade again,
01:31by reducing tariffs in non-sensitive sectors.
01:34How important is it for the rest of the world that these two massive countries, massive economies,
01:42have this dialogue, especially for countries that have relations with both?
01:47Well, you know, it's a necessary condition for peace and stability in the world.
01:55And the last thing anyone could tolerate, and the consequences would be catastrophic,
02:03would be a great power of military conflict.
02:06I think this is a much better approach than what we saw under Biden,
02:09which was very antagonistic and confrontational.
02:13And I think this is a very positive development in terms of world peace and stability.
02:18Let's talk a little bit about the services economy,
02:22because the United States exports a lot of its services,
02:25whether it's finance, consulting, tourism, education,
02:29but it's not always calculated in when they're looking at trade deficits.
02:34How important is it for things like that to be included in these talks?
02:38I think it's a pity that there's a focus on bilateral trade balances or imbalances.
02:43What matters is the global balance for any country,
02:47not just bilateral with one country or another.
02:50But, yeah, I mean, services are extremely important part of trade.
02:56And if you add services in,
02:58then it would reduce the size of the notional U.S.-China trade imbalance.
03:04Thank you very much.
03:04Thank you very much.
