The United States is working to hollow out the G20’s agenda and turn its December summit “into a backdrop” for a likely meeting between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Miami, the South China Morning Post has learned.
Two delegation members described the effort as the group’s top negotiators, also known as sherpas, met in Washington on Monday and Tuesday for their second in a planned series of sessions to draft the Joint Declaration that leaders are to issue at the summit.
They said the US “pressed to strip the text of language on poverty reduction, energy transition and gender” and to narrow the agenda to immigration, transnational crime, terrorism, foreign investment and what it calls “fair trade”.
Both spoke on condition of anonymity because the negotiations were private.
One said the US had worked since December, when the group first met, to draft language “favouring its own interests over smaller, developing economies”, and described the gathering as something the Americans treated as “a pretty backdrop for a photo of Trump and Xi”.
The SCMP reached out to both the White House and the US State Department, but neither immediately responded to requests for comment.
Russia has aired the same grievance in public, with Marat Berdyev, its ambassador-at-large for G20 and Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) affairs, saying in June that Washington’s conduct as chair had been “to put it mildly, not impeccable”.
Berdyev said Russia was blocked from finance-track meetings in April and May by visa and accreditation failures the US blamed on technical problems, that representatives of two sanctioned Russian organisations were barred from entering the country, and that Moscow had filed formal protests.
But the Russian negotiators took part in this week’s talks nonetheless, with a delegation led by sherpa Denis Agafonov, head of the presidential experts’ directorate. Berdyev told state news agency Tass that the meeting would turn on preparations for Miami and on tracks “including trade, energy and finance”.
The summit is set for December 14-15 at Trump National Doral, the president’s own golf resort in Miami, where Xi is expected to travel and where a meeting between the two leaders would be the likely centrepiece.
It would cap a year in which the two agreed to back each other’s marquee events, with China hosting the Apec leaders’ meeting in Shenzhen in November and the US staging the G20 weeks later.
The Chinese embassy in Washington would not say whether parallel bilateral talks were taking place at the expense of the sherpas’ meeting on Monday and Tuesday.
In a written response to SCMP, it referred back to the May summit in Beijing, where Xi and Trump had “reached a series of important common understandings” 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 climate transition
Washington has rebuilt its presidency around a narrower economic agenda, and, in a December post, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced what he called a “New G20” centred on cutting regulation, securing energy supplies and developing technologies such as artificial intelligence.
A delegate heard by the SCMP said the US had stopped advancing energy-transition initiatives and was “surprised” that China, for which the transition is a central policy, had not objected.
On that point, the Chinese embassy offered no explanation for Beijing’s restraint, saying only that China had built “the world’s most complete policy system on reducing carbon emissions” and “the world’s largest renewable energy system”, and that as “a responsible major developing country” it stood ready to help “build a clean and beautiful world”.
“China’s efforts in combating climate change and advancing the global development and application of renewable energy are widely recognised,” the statement added.
That account of China’s record abroad sat awkwardly against its silence in the negotiations, and it tracked the limited target Xi set at the United Nations in September, when he pledged to cut China’s net greenhouse gas emissions seven to 10 per cent below peak levels by 2035, in Beijing’s first absolute emissions target.
Analysts said at that time that the goal fell well short of the roughly 30 per cent cut needed to align with the Paris Agreement’s 2C path – to keep global temperatures well below 2C – and named no peak year.
The embassy would also not confirm who was negotiating for China in Washington this week, saying it was “not aware of the specifics”.
Executive Vice Foreign Minister Ma Zhaoxu served as the G20 sherpa for years but has been focused on developing the Brics (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) association in recent times. At last year’s sherpas talks in South Africa, the country was mostly represented by Bai Tian and Wang Qi of the foreign ministry’s international economic department.
Disruptions continue to blight G20 plans
This week’s meeting was the second under the US presidency to proceed without South Africa, the outgoing 2025 chair and a founding member that Trump barred after repeating his claim of a “white genocide” against Afrikaner farmers, an allegation Pretoria rejects.
The exclusion, the first of a full member in the group’s history, has drawn objections from several governments, including Brazil, France, Germany and the United Kingdom.
But the South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has said his country remains a member “in its own name and right” and has refused to plead for an invitation.
Strains also surfaced earlier in the year, when the first G20 finance ministers’ meeting under the US presidency ended in Washington in April without a joint statement or the customary news conference.
China was represented there by Finance Minister Lan Fo’an, who leads its finance track, a channel separate from the sherpas. -- SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST
