Trump presses Xi on trade, N Korea

President Donald Trump pressed Chinese President Xi Jinping to do more to curb North Korea's nuclear program and help reduce the gaping US trade deficit with Beijing in talks on Friday, even as he toned down the strident anti-China rhetoric of his election campaign.

Trump spoke publicly of progress on a range of issues in his first US-China summit – as did several of his top aides – but they provided few concrete specifics other than China's agreement to work together to narrow disagreements and find common ground for cooperation.

As the two leaders wrapped up a Florida summit overshadowed by US missile strikes in Syria overnight, Xi joined Trump in stressing the positive mood of the meetings while papering over deep differences that have caused friction between the world's two biggest economies.

Trump's aides insisted he had made good on his pledge to raise concerns about China's trade practices and said there was some headway, with Xi agreeing to a 100-day plan for trade talks aimed at boosting US exports and reducing China's trade surplus with the United States.

Speaking after the two-day summit at Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson also said that Xi had agreed to increased cooperation in reining in North Korea's missile and nuclear programs – though he did not offer any new formula for cracking Pyongyang's defiant attitude.

Tillerson said Trump had accepted Xi's invitation to visit China and that they also agreed to upgrade a US-China dialogue by putting the two presidents at the head of the forum.

"We have made tremendous progress in our relationship with China," Trump told reporters as the two delegations met around tables flanked by large U.S. and Chinese flags. "We will be making additional progress. The relationship developed by President Xi and myself I think is outstanding.

"And I believe lots of very potentially bad problems will be going away," he added, without providing details.

Xi also spoke in mostly positive terms.

China's official Xinhua news agency said Xi had encouraged the United States to take part in the "One Belt, One Road" plan, Xi's signature foreign policy imitative aimed at infrastructure development across Asia, Africa and Europe, seen in some policy circles as a partial answer to the pivot to Asia strategy of Trump's predecessor Barack Obama.

Chinese state media yesterday cheered the meeting as one that showed the world that confrontation between the two powers was not inevitable and established the tone for the development of US-China relations.