US guts G20 agenda and makes Miami summit ‘backdrop for Trump-Xi meeting’: sources

THE UNITED STATES strives to hollow out the G20 agenda and make the December summit “a backdrop” for a probable meeting between the American president Donald Trump and Chinese president Xi Jinping in Miami, the South China Morning Post has learned.

Two members of the delegation described the effort as the group’s top negotiators, also known as sherpas, met in Washington Monday and Tuesday for the second in a series of sessions planned to draft the joint statement the leaders are expected to issue at the summit.

They said the United States “pressed to remove from the text any mention of poverty reduction, energy transition and gender” and to narrow the agenda to immigration, transnational crime, terrorism, foreign investment and what it called “fair trade.”

Both spoke on condition of anonymity because the negotiations were private.

One said the United States had worked since December, when the group first met, to draft text “favoring its own interests over smaller and developing economies,” and described the meeting as something Americans treated as “a nice backdrop for a photo of Trump and Xi.”

The SCMP contacted the White House and the U.S. State Department, but neither immediately responded to requests for comment.

Russia has publicly expressed the same grievance, with Marat Berdyev, its roving ambassador for G20 and the affairs of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), saying in June that Washington’s conduct as president had been “not impeccable, to say the least.”

Berdyev said Russia was blocked from accessing meetings on the financial track in April and May due to visa and accreditation issues that the United States blamed on technical problems, the fact that representatives of two sanctioned Russian organizations had not been allowed into the country, and Moscow had lodged formal protests.

But Russian negotiators nevertheless participated in the negotiations this week, with a delegation led by Sherpa Denis Agafonov, head of the presidential experts’ directorate. Berdyev told the official Tass news agency that the meeting would focus on preparations for Miami and aspects “including trade, energy and finance.”

The summit is scheduled for Dec. 14-15 at Trump National Doral, the president’s golf course in Miami, where Xi is expected to visit and where a meeting between the two leaders would likely be the centerpiece.

This would limit a year in which the two men agreed to support each other in their milestone eventswith China to host Apec leaders’ meeting in Shenzhen in November and the United States hosts the G20 a few weeks later.

The Chinese embassy in Washington would not say whether parallel bilateral negotiations were taking place to the detriment of the Sherpas meeting on Monday and Tuesday.

In a written response to the SCMP, he referred to the May summit in Beijingwhere Xi and Trump had “reached a series of important joint agreements” and where “the two sides agreed to support each other in hosting the Apec Economic Leaders’ Meeting and the G20 Summit.”

New priorities and silence on the climate transition

Washington rebuilt its presidency around a narrower economic agendaand, in a December article, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced what it called a “new G20” focused on reducing regulation, securing energy supplies and developing technologies such as artificial intelligence.

A delegate heard by the SCMP said the United States had stopped promoting energy transition initiatives and was “surprised” that China, for which the transition is a central policy, had not opposed them.

On this point, the Chinese embassy offered no explanation for Beijing’s restraint, saying only that China had built “the world’s most comprehensive policy system in reducing carbon emissions” and “the world’s largest renewable energy system”, and that as a “responsible major developing country”, it was ready to help “build a clean and beautiful world”.

“China’s efforts to combat climate change and advance the development and application of renewable energy globally are widely recognized,” the statement added.

This account of China’s record abroad contrasted poorly with its silence during the negotiations, and it followed the limited goal Xi set for himself at the United Nations in Septemberwhen he pledged to reduce China’s net greenhouse gas emissions by seven to 10 percent below peak levels by 2035, as part of Beijing’s first absolute emissions target.

Analysts said at the time that the target fell well short of the roughly 30% reduction needed to align with the Paris Agreement’s 2C trajectory – to keep global temperatures well below 2C – and pointed to no peak year.

The embassy also would not confirm who was negotiating for China in Washington this week, saying it was “not aware of the details.”

Executive Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Ma Zhaoxu has been the sherpa of the G20 for years, but has recently focused on the development of the Brics association (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa). At last year’s Sherpa negotiations in South Africa, the country was mainly represented by Bai Tian and Wang Qi, from the international economic department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Disruptions continue to hurt G20 plans

This week’s meeting was the second under the US presidency to take place without South Africaoutgoing president for 2025 and founding member whom Trump excluded after repeating his allegations of “white genocide” against Afrikaner farmers, an allegation Pretoria rejects.

This exclusion, the first of a full member in the group’s history, sparked objections from several governments, including Brazil, France, Germany And the United Kingdom.

But the South African president Cyrille Ramaphosa declared that his country remained a member “in its own right and in its own right” and refused to argue for an invitation.

Tensions also emerged earlier in the year, when the first meeting of G20 finance ministers under the US presidency ended in Washington in April without a joint statement or a regular press conference.

China was represented there by Finance Minister Lan Fo’an, who heads the financial sector, a separate channel from the Sherpas. — SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST