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Barack Obama |
Spread over two days - Friday and Saturday - at a picturesque desert resort in Southern California, Obama, 51, and Xi, 59, had several rounds of meetings spread over nearly eight hours on a range of bilateral, regional and global issues.
"The President had very good discussions in an informal atmosphere, uniquely informal atmosphere, with President Xi over the last two days," National Security Advisor Tom Donilon told reporters after the conclusion of the two-day summit.
"The discussions were positive and constructive, wide-ranging and quite successful in achieving the goals that we set forth for this meeting," he said.
Cyber security and cyber issues, a "center of the relationship" between the world's largest economies, were one of the important topics when the two leaders had discussions on economic issues.
"Actually those issues took up most of the discussion this morning between President Obama and President Xi. Obviously, given the importance of our economic ties, the President made clear the threat posed to our economic and national security by cyber-enabled economic espionage," Donilon said yesterday.
"The President underscored that resolving this issue is really key to the future of US-China economic relations. He asked President Xi to continue to look seriously at the problem that we've raised here," he said.
Human rights and military relationship were other issues discussed between the two leaders, he said.
Donilon said the specific issue that Obama talked to Xi is the issue of cyber-enabled economic theft of intellectual property and other kinds of property in the public and private realm in the United States by entities based in China.
The "unprecedented" theft of American intellectual property is costing the nation a whopping USD 300 billion annually and the main culprit is China, according to a study.
"We've undertaken, as you know, a systematic effort with respect to this issue. We have had conversations with the Chinese about it over the course of the last year or so. We've raised it publicly," he added.
Donilon said he has personally briefed officials of the key American allies in the region about the meeting.
"I think I actually have meetings with representatives on Tuesday to go through a complete debrief, and I expect that the President will be in touch with his counterparts of the key allies to go through this," he said.
"This is part of our rebalancing effort here. Our rebalancing effort to Asia is a comprehensive effort to correct what we saw as an imbalance in our efforts globally, to invest more in Asia because we see our future linked to Asia increasingly as we go into the 21st century," he said.
"That rebalancing effort has many elements to it. It includes, first and foremost, reinvigoration of our alliances, and I think we've been quite successful on that, frankly, from the time we've come into office. It includes engaging and deepening our relationship with emerging powers such as India and Indonesia, and we've been quite active on that," he said.
"It involves our working on the security and political architecture in Asia, and we have been working very hard on that - including the President's decision to participate at the summit level in the East Asia Summit and our determination to make that institution be the premiere diplomatic and security institution in Asia," he said.
Among other things, Donilon said the two leaders agreed that "North Korea has to denuclearise, that neither country will accept North Korea as a nuclear-armed state and that we would work together to deepen cooperation and dialogue to achieve denuclearization."