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00:00Stephen Engel, Bloomberg News chief, North Asia correspondent, covered the summit, and Shen Kingston is ABC's new State Department reporter,
00:06and she was here all week covering the UN.
00:08Stephen, I want to start with you, because in diplomatic worlds, one of the things everybody looks for is the
00:13readouts from these meetings.
00:15So you had the Trump-Xi meetings, you had a big state dinner, you had all this fanfare.
00:19Talk to us about what you saw that was different from what the U.S. put out about it, what
00:24China put out about it, and what was missing,
00:27because sometimes what is omitted is almost as important as what's put in the text.
00:31Yeah, I think some of the comments on AI, that they're absolutely willing to, one, accept the terminology that Donald
00:38Trump is going to be using for AI,
00:40and that's superintelligence, and also thinks that they should be working together.
00:45That is in a bit of a contrast as far as the safety side of AI.
00:49China coming out, saying they attach the importance of the U.S. position on AI and respects the use of
00:56superintelligence.
00:57China seeks to strengthen communication, deepen discussions, and reach consensus as these technologies develop.
01:04And again, Xi Jinping at this summit was a little bit more verbose about AI and the need to jointly,
01:10and they have the capability and the responsibility to put up these guardrails.
01:15Well, Donald Trump obviously has talked about some of those bigger goals about protecting mankind and the threat of AI
01:23and slowing down the pace of development of superintelligence as a bit of a hoax.
01:28So we'll have to see.
01:30Han Zheng speaking now.
01:32We understand he's going to be talking quite a bit about AI, so we'll be looking for some headlines.
01:37Han Zheng sort of taking Xi Jinping's place at the podium there at the U.N.
01:42He is the vice president, but he's also the guy who greeted Donald Trump at the Beijing airport in May.
01:50He's the vice president, former Politburo Standing Committee member.
01:55So he's not on the highest, super powerful Politburo Standing Committee of the seven most powerful men in China,
02:02but still with the title of vice president.
02:04So we'll have to hear what he has to say.
02:06Basically standing instead of Xi Jinping there at the U.N.
02:12General Assembly.
02:12We've been monitoring the terminal for headlines as we continue this conversation.
02:15Shannon, let me turn to you, and I'm curious how you see these two events in complement.
02:19So we had the president of the United States making the journey to New York and delivering a speech.
02:23We don't have the Chinese president doing that.
02:25What did it say to you having these happen in tandem?
02:27And indeed, there is this conversation that's been taking place in New York about AI,
02:30but it does seem like the locus of it, the focus of it, what was seen as most important
02:34was the conversation that presumably took place in and around the White House in Washington.
02:41Yeah, that's right.
02:42And when it comes to this very consequential relationship between the U.S. and China,
02:47Christina was absolutely right.
02:48What goes unsaid is just as important.
02:50So when we look at President Xi's decision not to speak before the U.N.,
02:54there's a little more there than meets the eye,
02:56because there has been an almost obsessive-like focus by both countries on reciprocity,
03:03making sure the terms are exactly equal.
03:05So when President Trump went to Beijing earlier this year, that was just an out-and-back trip.
03:10They made sure of that.
03:12And so when President Xi came to the U.S. now,
03:14they didn't want to create the perception or allow for the image that,
03:19hey, you know, he was just stopping by in Washington while he was already there for the United Nations.
03:23They wanted to really put a different spotlight on this.
03:27So these conversations on AI or superintelligence, you know, unclear to me if that term is going to take off
03:34yet.
03:35A lot of it has been, you know, very nice in early stages between the U.S. and China.
03:39They're talking about setting up a working group, you know, talking about information sharing.
03:43But what is going to be just as important as getting those systems up and running is establishing trust.
03:50So the criticism that this state visit was maybe all pomp and circumstance, not enough substance,
03:57there is still, you know, a feeling from a lot of experts and officials in this space
04:01that building the relationship is really, you know, not a waste of time
04:07because that trust is going to be, oh, you know, what really defines the moment at the end of the
04:12day.
04:12And Stephen, when you're looking at what Shannon was just talking about,
04:15this desire to have these two on equal footing,
04:18have the trips be perceived as equal durations, equal of importance,
04:22there was an interesting dynamic playing out with the media coverage of this
04:25because President Trump was having a spat with one of, or several actually,
04:28of the U.S. TV pool members and some of the reporters,
04:31and that impacted who could get in to cover the state dinner.
04:35And I was reading that this was covered much more heavily with the imagery in Chinese state media,
04:39and, you know, it was all over the front pages of the communist main newspaper there in Beijing.
04:45And, you know, it was a little less spectacular here in the U.S.,
04:49partially because of access issues and then partially because there was also a lot going on with the U.N.
04:53But I'm wondering how those trips were received on both sides of the world.
04:57Yeah, if you look at the media coverage, it is interesting
05:00because I was there on the north lawn of the White House on two consecutive days,
05:05including the days of the summit.
05:06And I was listening to a lot of the domestic U.S. coverage,
05:10and it was predominantly about the ban and then the solidarity of the other,
05:16you know, towards CNN, Politico, and MSNOW,
05:20and maybe not as much detail about the summit itself.
05:26I found that striking coming from Asia, where we cover the details,
05:30obviously, of the geopolitical relationship in quite great detail
05:35on policy and commercial ties.
05:38But that being said,
05:40the fact that there wasn't a lot of Chinese corporations or executives in that dinner
05:47made it a little maybe less important on the commercial side.
05:52But I agree with Shannon completely that the Chinese side,
05:56the government officials that were there,
05:59and the focus of this summit was clearly on showing Xi Jinping as being an equal to the United States
06:07and being treated as an equal as well.
06:09So that was probably the main goal of this fairly short visit.
06:13But I think they ticked all the boxes.
06:15And I talked to a number of the CGTN reporters.
06:18They had a large contingent.
06:20That's the international arm of China Central Television, state media.
06:24They had a pretty big contingent here,
06:26as well as two camera crews on last weekend outside the JPMorgan Chase headquarters
06:33where He Li Feng and Scott Besant met for trade advance talks
06:38to kind of lay the deliverables for the summit on Thursday.
06:41They have a big contingent here.
06:43Steve, let me pick up on that.
06:44And I want to ask you just about President Xi's motivations in coming to the U.S.
06:48And there was a piece that the Stimson Center, a think tank, put out
06:51showing the decline in President Xi's travel in recent years,
06:54certainly since the COVID pandemic.
06:57I'm curious why that is the case,
06:58what the speculation is that he's not traveling as much.
07:01Perhaps it's just that world leaders are traveling to China more than they had been before.
07:04But what does it say that he's made the effort to come here?
07:07Indeed, there's going to be this trip that President Trump is going to take to China
07:09before this meeting of the G20 in Doral in Florida.
07:14From a Chinese lens, how important was this trip making this pilgrimage to Washington?
07:23Was that for Shannon or me?
07:24It was for you, Stephen, if I could.
07:25Yeah, go ahead.
07:25Sorry, I'll pick up on that.
07:27I think this was incredibly important.
07:29And he did also have some diplomatic outreach in the weeks leading up to this.
07:33I think he went to India as well as another trip.
07:37I think the U.S.-China relationship for optics and strategy is critical, absolutely critical.
07:46And I was looking at the China Daily a couple of days ago, actually on the day of the summit,
07:51the international version of the China Daily newspaper, the English version of state media.
07:56The first seven pages of the newspaper were all about this U.S.-China summit.
08:02That tells you how much importance they put in this trip.
08:06And again, the Xi Jinping readout that you asked me previously, they essentially say that
08:12Xi sees a brighter China-U.S. future.
08:15So it's extremely important to the Chinese to be seen on equal footing.
08:21And if they can get an AI dialogue where the two leaders, if you will, as they referred to themselves,
08:28in this burgeoning technology, if they can be having a dialogue on equal footing, that would be a victory.
08:35Shannon, as we talk about how important it is optically, diplomatically, for these leaders to make the effort
08:40to go travel to these places, it does seem startling to me that this week we saw quite a few
08:45big names skipping the U.N.
08:47Obviously, we talked about Xi.
08:49Putin was not here.
08:50A German chancellor is facing a very contentious election battle back home.
08:54He opted out.
08:55Maloney was not here.
08:57Mahmoud Abbas did not come.
08:58How significant is that in a time when the U.N. is struggling to kind of find its place as
09:04geopolitical plates kind of shift?
09:08Well, I'll say with Mahmoud Abbas, he wasn't, of course, allowed to come for the second year straight.
09:13The Trump administration denied to give Palestinian authority officials visas to come to the U.N., breaking with tradition there.
09:20So that was one exception.
09:22But for everybody else, you're absolutely right.
09:24There were different agendas at play.
09:26They had other things to do.
09:27And this comes at a time where a lot of people who did come, a lot of world leaders who
09:31did take the time to travel to New York, give a speech before the U.N., they used it to
09:37criticize the body, say that it is ineffectual, that it has fallen from its mission, its core mission statement.
09:45Being able to bring countries together and broker peace, because even with this high-level week happening, we know that
09:53the real work typically happens behind the scenes, these sideline meetings.
09:57We saw it with the Iran and U.S. talks that happened earlier on in the week, where this is
10:04all a matter of convenience that all these countries are there.
10:07So the U.N., the next secretary general, is definitely going to have a challenge to face to restore the
10:15body to something that can be trusted by not just most countries, but basically every single country as an effective
10:24platform.
10:25Shannon, what's your perspective on the way that this administration views the U.N. right now?
10:30So it says something that the president came and spoke.
10:32He didn't unbraid the U.N. in the way that he has in the past.
10:36He has somebody as his ambassador to the U.N., Mike Waltz, who seems to be very engaged with the
10:41reforms that you've been talking about here just a moment ago.
10:44Do they see things proceeding apace?
10:46Do they have kind of a radical vision of what the U.N. looks like going forward?
10:49Talk about that in the context of, again, this leadership transition that's underway at the Group of Nations here in
10:54New York.
10:57There's two different stories here, right?
10:59Because the Trump administration will still be hotly critical of the United Nations.
11:02And they've made it very clear that there are certain branches of it that they don't agree with.
11:08They think it's, you know, anti-Israeli.
11:11They think it goes counter to, you know, the America first ethos of the Trump administration.
11:15So they definitely have plenty of issues, but they do also still see it as a useful tool.
11:20Sometimes it's all about messaging for the most part.
11:24But we're also seeing an increased amount of contributions flowing from the U.S. to the U.N., even though,
11:30you know, President Trump said when he came in that this was going to be a very different relationship, that
11:35he was no longer going to be footing the bill for so much of what the U.N. does.
11:40So really, you know, the behind-the-scenes story is a little bit different there.
11:44There is still an interest in keeping a lot of what the U.N. does up and running, and that
11:48does require both money and political buy-in that we are seeing from the White House.
11:53Shannon, I've also got a lot of issues, but, you know, on we go, functioning as well as we can.
11:58The reform effort is underway here.
11:59The reform effort is ongoing.
12:01Stephen, I want to ask you also about we've talked about different approaches to policy, diplomacy, AI.
12:07One of the other things that I don't think it's talked about enough is soft power and how, as the
12:11U.S. has stepped back from soft power approaches to diplomacy and influence of the world, China has really embraced
12:17it and kind of stepped into some of those chasms created from the U.S. pullback.
12:21I think about foreign aid.
12:23I think about, you know, outreach to fledgling governments.
12:27And we've also got the pandas.
12:28So we've only got about a minute left, but talk about panda and soft power and why this is something
12:34the Chinese continue to use.
12:35Well, I was born in 1966, and I remember when Ling Ling and Xing Xing came to America in 1972.
12:42I was a six-year-old kid in school, and it was, you know, a pretty significant thing.
12:48What's a panda, right?
12:49And it was neat to have those two, you know, pandas come from China.
12:55So I remember it vividly.
12:57I also remember when the moon landing and the TV would be rolled into the classroom.
13:01So I'm aging myself right now.
13:03But it was significant back then.
13:05And I know you maybe have panda fatigue, panda diplomacy fatigue.
13:09But it is a gesture of Chinese soft power for sure, the only nation that really has them.
13:16So I think it's maybe inconsequential in the bigger picture, but it is the soft power and a gracious gift
13:23from the Chinese lending, I should say.
13:25I will try to be more bullish on the pandas.
13:28It's part of that reform agenda that I mentioned a moment ago.
13:31Stephen Engel, our chief North Asia correspondent, and Shannon Kingston joining us from ABC News.
13:35She's our diplomatic correspondent.
13:36Thank you both so much.
13:37Great to talk to both of them.
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