China’s foreign minister Wang Yi picked up the phone to Washington on Wednesday, and Beijing liked what it heard. The call with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio was “positive and constructive,” according to China’s state news agency Xinhua, which also said Beijing was ready to keep talking.
The timing was no accident. In about a week, leaders from across the Pacific gather in Shenzhen for the APEC summit, and Presidents Xi Jinping and Donald Trump are expected to sit down there. Wednesday’s call was, in effect, the warm-up act.
A call timed for Shenzhen
The APEC Economic Leaders’ Meeting runs on November 18 and 19 in Shenzhen, and the Xi-Trump meeting is the one everyone will be watching. The two presidents have already met twice this year, and the summits seem to have steadied a relationship that spent much of the decade wobbling.
Rubio gave reporters a hint of what might come next. Speaking on Tuesday, he said work was already underway to arrange a three-way meeting on the APEC sidelines — Trump, Xi and Russian President Vladimir Putin in the same room. Trump wants that meeting to happen, Rubio said, adding: “We think it should be possible.”
Wang, for his part, sounded pleased with the state of things, and careful about how fragile it is. The current stability in China-US relations “has not come easily,” he said, calling it “a rational choice made by the two major countries based on respective and shared interests,” according to the Xinhua report.
There was one notable silence. Hours after the call, there was still no readout from the US State Department. That doesn’t mean Washington disagreed with Beijing’s version — readouts often come later, or not at all — but it does mean the world has only China’s account of the conversation so far.
The Peninsula, reporting from Beijing, added a couple of details of its own. It said Wang told Rubio that China was “willing to strengthen communication and cooperation” with the United States, and that the two countries would support each other in hosting the 2026 APEC summit and the G20 summit in the United States.
The trilateral idea — and China’s doubts
If the three-way meeting happens, it would be the most striking image of the Shenzhen summit. Trump said on Sunday that he thought he would meet Xi and Putin there and discuss ending the war in Iran and denuclearization. He said in October that he was open to three-way arms control talks with Xi and Putin, focused on nuclear weapons.
The Wall Street Journal has reported that Putin has pitched using a trilateral meeting to discuss an end to Russia’s long-running war in Ukraine. That would put two wars, one room, and three leaders with very different ideas about how either conflict should end.
China, though, has sounded far less keen on the nuclear part of the idea. Its foreign ministry said last month that China’s “nuclear strength is by no means at the same level with that of the US and Russia” and that it would be “neither fair, reasonable nor realistic to ask China to join the so-called trilateral nuclear disarmament negotiations at this stage.”
That’s the tension at the heart of the Shenzhen plan. Trump likes the idea of a three-way table. Putin, according to the Journal, sees a chance to talk about Ukraine. China is happy to talk about trade and stability, but it has drawn a clear line at joining nuclear disarmament talks as an equal. Whether all three can agree on what the meeting is even about will decide whether it happens at all.
Trade, tech and the parts that still don’t fit
Step back from the summit planning and the picture gets messier. This year’s Trump-Xi summits appear to have helped stabilize relations, but they have done little to narrow the broad differences between the two strategic rivals.
Trade is the clearest example. In Washington in September, the two sides agreed a two-month extension of a trade truce that had been due to expire in November. Yet disputes over tariffs, Chinese purchases of US goods, rare earth exports and technology restrictions remained unresolved. The two countries had reached an agreement to calm trade tensions during last year’s APEC summit in South Korea, after they had exchanged tariff escalations earlier in 2025. A year on, the same files are still open.
Technology is the other fault line, and it may be the harder one to close. On Tuesday, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the two sides would advance a new dialogue on artificial intelligence, but added that they should “harbor no illusions about their differences” as they seek to manage the technology’s risks while competing for AI supremacy.
That phrase — no illusions — is worth keeping in mind. Both sides keep talking. Both sides keep calling the talks constructive. And both sides keep competing, hard, on the issues that matter most to them: chips, rare earths, AI, and who sets the rules for the next decade of technology.
What happens next
All eyes now turn to Shenzhen on November 18 and 19. Three things will tell us whether Wednesday’s call meant much, or just sounded good.
First, does the Xi-Trump meeting get formally confirmed, and what comes out of it? Second, does the trilateral idea survive contact with reality — will Trump, Xi and Putin actually sit down together, and if so, to talk about what? Third, does Washington issue its own account of the Wang-Rubio call, and does it match Beijing’s upbeat version?
For now, the call itself is the signal. Two foreign ministers talked. China called it positive. The summit is a week away. And both sides, for the moment at least, are still choosing to talk.
Sources: Reuters; The Peninsula Qatar; Xinhua (via Reuters).
