China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, held a “positive and constructive” telephone call with the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, on Wednesday, Beijing said, as the two powers prepare for a leaders’ meeting in Shenzhen next week.
China’s state news agency Xinhua reported that Wang told Rubio Beijing was willing to strengthen communication and cooperation with Washington. The current stability in the relationship “has not come easily”, Wang said, describing it as “a rational choice made by the two major countries based on respective and shared interests”.
The call comes roughly a week before the APEC Economic Leaders’ Meeting in Shenzhen, where Presidents Xi Jinping and Donald Trump are expected to meet. The two leaders have already met twice this year, and the summits appear to have steadied a relationship strained by tariffs, technology restrictions, rare-earth exports and disputes over Chinese purchases of American goods.
Rubio told reporters on Tuesday that work was under way to arrange a trilateral meeting on the APEC sidelines involving Trump, Xi and Russian President Vladimir Putin. “We think it should be possible,” he said. Trump said on Sunday that he expected to meet Xi and Putin in Shenzhen and discuss ending the war in Iran and denuclearisation.
The Wall Street Journal has reported that Putin has pitched using a three-way meeting to discuss an end to Russia’s war in Ukraine. Trump said in October that he was open to three-way arms control talks with Xi and Putin, focused on nuclear weapons, although China has appeared less keen. Beijing said last month that its nuclear strength was “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 trilateral nuclear disarmament negotiations at this stage.
In Washington in September, the two sides agreed a two-month extension of a trade truce that had been due to expire in November, but the underlying disputes remain unresolved. On Tuesday, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the two countries would advance a new dialogue on artificial intelligence, while warning they should “harbour no illusions about their differences” as they seek to manage the technology’s risks while competing for AI supremacy.
No account of the call had yet been issued by the US State Department, so the description of its tone rests so far on Beijing’s account alone.
Sources: Reuters, “China’s foreign minister says call with Rubio was ‘positive and constructive'” (https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-foreign-minister-says-call-with-rubio-was-positive-constructive-2026-11-11/); Xinhua, via Reuters.
