South Korean President Lee Jae Myung hosted Chinese leader Xi Jinping on Saturday for their first meeting, as Xi used the APEC summit to revive long-fraught regional relationships in the absence of U.S. President Donald Trump.
The talks on the sidelines of the APEC gathering came on the final day of Xi's first trip to South Korea in more than a decade and a day after his meeting with Canada's premier that was a reset of the nations' damaged ties.
Trump had flown to South Korea for the summit, but promptly jetted home Thursday after sealing a trade war pause with Xi, with the two agreeing to dial down a dispute that has roiled markets and disrupted global supply chains.
Trump's departure left the Chinese leader to take center stage at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, where he framed Beijing as a responsible power against the chaos unleashed by the United States on the international order.
Lee welcomed Xi at a grand opening ceremony complete with soldiers wearing traditional garb.
The visit was the Chinese leader's first since 2014 and comes after years of strained ties over everything from trade to cultural disputes.
Lee told Xi he had "long looked forward to meeting you in person" and framed his trip as a reset in relations.
"As our two countries move from a vertical structure of economic cooperation to a more horizontal and mutually beneficial one, we must work together to build a relationship that delivers shared prosperity," Lee told Xi, whose vast economy represents South Korea's largest trading partner.
Xi, in turn, described China and South Korea as "important neighbors that cannot be moved and also partners that cannot be separated".
Lee also pitched China as a partner in South Korea's efforts to rekindle frayed ties with the North, with which it remains technically at war.
Stressing the need for "stability" in the region, Lee noted "recent high-level exchanges between China and North Korea", a reference to leader Kim Jong Un's recent attendance at a major military parade in Beijing.
Those meetings, Lee said, "are helping to create conditions for renewed engagement with Pyongyang".
"I hope that South Korea and China will strengthen strategic communication... and work together to resume dialogue with the North," Lee told Xi.
Ahead of Lee and Xi's meeting, Pyongyang had dismissed Seoul's hopes for denuclearization as a "pipedream" which "can never be realized even if it talks about it a thousand times".
Earlier in the day, Lee passed the APEC baton to Xi, who will host next year's summit in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen.
With the U.S. president absent, the Chinese leader has used APEC to reach out to countries with which Beijing has had frosty relations.
Xi met on Friday with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney on the sidelines of the event -- the first formal talks between the two countries' leaders since 2017.
Xi told the Liberal leader he was determined to work together to get relations back on the "right track" and invited Carney to visit China.
Carney on Saturday described the meeting as a "turning point" in ties between Ottawa and Beijing.
Canada's relations with China are among the worst of any Western nation.
But the two can find common ground as both are at the sharp end of Trump's tariff onslaught, even after Xi and the US leader's deal Thursday to dial back tensions.
Carney said Saturday he had apologized to Trump over an anti-tariff ad featuring former US leader Ronald Reagan that sent the president into a rage, leading him to cancel trade talks and slap additional 10 percent tariffs on Canada.
Trade talks would restart when the United States was "ready", Carney said.
And, he said, he had accepted Xi's invitation to visit "in the new year".
Xi also sat down on Friday with Japan's premier Sanae Takaichi for the first time since she was appointed in October.
Takaichi, Japan's first woman prime minister, has long been seen as a China hawk and has been a regular visitor to the Yasukuni shrine that honours Japan's war dead, a site that angers China and South Korea.
She told Xi that she wanted a "strategic and mutually beneficial relationship".
