Mark your calendars for Trump-Jinping meeting on April 6-7

The US president Donald Trump will meet his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping on April 6th and 7th. The meeting would be held in President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida. It was well expected that these two leaders of the world’s largest and second-largest economy would meet at some point in April but this is for the first a date has been confirmed. Chinese state-owned news agency Xinhua reported on this citing a statement from China’s foreign ministry.

China has been one of those countries of whom President Trump was very critical of during his campaigning. Though he did not blame China but his own country’s past negotiators in the matters of trade, he has been very critical of China with regard to its policies in the South China Sea and its stance towards North Korea. While these security issues are likely to get discussed during their meeting, the main focus would be on trade. China enjoys a massive trade surplus with the United States, which runs in hundreds of billions of dollar every year. Last year, for goods trade, China enjoyed a surplus of $347 billion. President Trump, treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin, and the commerce secretary Wilbur Ross; all have cleared that balancing the trade by reducing deficits are top priorities of this new administration.