Trump and Xi hold first face-to-face talks in six years
Newshour
BBC
4.2 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 30 October 2025
⏱️ 48 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Xi Jinping and Donald Trump have held their first face-to-face talks in six years in a moment of high trade tension between China and the US.
Mr Trump hailed an "amazing" meeting with his Chinese counterpart, but Beijing was less effusive. Thursday's talks did not lead to a formal agreement but the announcements suggest they are closer to a deal. We'll try to work out what has been sorted out at the talks in South Korea.
Also in the programme: The latest mass killings in Sudan spark international outrage, with the RSF rebel leader promising an immediate investigation into the actions of his troops; the Dutch election is a neck-and-neck race between centrist liberals and anti-Islam populists; and five more suspects have been arrested over the Louvre museum jewellery heist.
(Photo shows US president Donald Trump and Chinese president Xi Jinping shake hands in Busan, South Korea on 30 October 2025. Credit: Yonhap/EPA)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, radio, podcasts. |
| 0:09.5 | Hello and welcome to NewsHour. |
| 0:11.6 | It's coming to you live from the BBC World Service studios in central London. |
| 0:15.6 | I'm Tim Franks. |
| 0:17.3 | And we're going to begin the programme at an airport in South Korea, the place that two |
| 0:22.2 | the most, perhaps the two most powerful men in the world, met for the first time in six years, |
| 0:29.2 | Donald Trump and Xi Jinping. And as for how that meeting went, given all the tensions and |
| 0:34.7 | tough language and talk of trade wars, well, when heads of state and government talk to each other, |
| 0:40.5 | you tend to get what's known in the trade as readout. |
| 0:43.9 | It's normally some fairly dry, cautious language worked up by a group of dry and cautious officials. |
| 0:50.9 | That's not Donald Trump's way. |
| 0:52.9 | On social media, he called the 90-minute conversation |
| 0:56.0 | truly great. aboard Air Force One, he went even more stratospheric. If you rank a meeting from |
| 1:02.9 | zero to ten, he told reporters, with ten being the best, well, this was a twelve. I thought it was |
| 1:09.9 | an amazing meeting. |
| 1:12.7 | He's a great leader, a leader of a very powerful, very strong country, China. |
| 1:18.6 | It was an outstanding group of decisions, I think, that was made. |
| 1:24.5 | A lot of decisions were made, too. |
| 1:26.2 | There wasn't too much left out there. |
| 1:29.3 | Effusiveness from Donald Trump. From China, the readout was rather more conventional and phlegmatic. |
| 1:35.9 | Guo Jia Kun is the Chinese foreign ministry spokesman. |
| 1:41.9 | The leaders of both countries agreed to maintain regular communication. |
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