BEIJING -- With President Xi Jinping out of the United States and no longer President Donald Trump's guest, China's state-run media Saturday denounced the missile strike on Syria, which the U.S. president told Xi about while they were finishing dinner Thursday.
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Xinhua, the state news agency, on Saturday called the strike the act of a weakened politician who needed to flex his muscles. In an analysis, Xinhua also said Trump had ordered the strike to distance himself from Syria's backers in Moscow, to overcome accusations that he is "pro-Russia." The report reflected China's official opposition to military interventions in the affairs of other countries.
Trump said his meetings with Xi went well.
He tweeted Saturday that "It was a great honor to have President Xi Jinping and Madame Peng Liyuan of China as our guests in the United States. Tremendous ... goodwill and friendship was formed, but only time will tell on trade."
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Chinese officials had feared that the two leaders' 24-hour encounter at Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida might be marred by a campaign-style, anti-China outburst from Trump. Instead, it was interrupted by the U.S. missile attack.
Some Chinese analysts said they viewed the attack's timing as no coincidence. Trump wants China to do more to deter the development of nuclear weapons by North Korea, its ally, and the analysts viewed the Syria attack as a reminder to Xi that the United States could also attack North Korea, if necessary.
The missile strike on Syria overshadowed meetings that U.S. and Chinese officials described as big-picture conversations on trade, as well as North Korea, and stopped short of producing specific agreements.
Both sides agreed that the North Korean threat had reached a "very serious" stage, according to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.
The Pentagon late Saturday said a Navy carrier strike group is moving toward the western Pacific Ocean to provide a physical presence near the Korean Peninsula. The U.S. Pacific Command directed the carrier group to the region after it departed Singapore on Saturday, according to a Navy news release. The carrier group includes the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson, with support from several missile destroyers and missile cruisers.
The official Chinese account of the talks in Xinhua did not mention North Korea -- a burning issue for Trump, but less so for Xi. Analysts said the omission was probably intentional, a response to the attack on Syria.
Xinhua's commentary on the Syria attack also did not mention North Korea.
The Chinese president rarely talks to the Chinese or foreign news media, making it difficult to determine his opinion about the attack or how he expressed it to Trump.
But Chinese analysts, whose advice is sometimes sought by the government on foreign policy questions, were scornful of the strike, which they viewed as a powerful country attacking a nation unable to fight back.
And they rejected what they viewed as an unspoken American message equating Syria, which has no nuclear arsenal, with North Korea, which has carried out five nuclear arms tests and hopes to mount a nuclear warhead on an intercontinental missile.
"I don't deny that the United States is capable of such an attack against North Korea, but you need to see that North Korea is capable of striking back," said Lu Chao, director of the Border Studies Institute at the Liaoning Academy of Social Sciences. "That would create chaos."
If Syria had nuclear weapons, the United States would not dare attack it, said Shen Dingli, a professor of international relations at Fudan University in Shanghai.
"Chemical weapons and nuclear weapons are totally different," Shen said. "A chemical bomb kills dozens of people, and the atomic bomb at Hiroshima killed hundreds of thousands."
Shen added that many Chinese were "thrilled" by the attack because it would probably result in the United States becoming further mired in the Middle East.
"If the United States gets trapped in Syria, how can Trump make America great again? As a result, China will be able to achieve its peaceful rise," Shen said, using a term Beijing employs to characterize its growing power. "Even though we say we oppose the bombing, deep in our hearts we are happy."
Focus on business
A statement from White House spokesman Sean Spicer late Friday cited an array of topics that the two leaders and their contingents discussed, from North Korea to cybersecurity to protecting human rights, and said Trump and Xi "established a new and Cabinet-level framework" for future talks.
"We have very similar economic interests, and there are areas where they clearly want to work with us," Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told reporters Friday. "The objective is for us to increase our exports to them."
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross added that "the most interesting thing to me was they expressed an interest in reducing their net trade balance because of the impact it's having on money supply and inflation. That's the first time I'd heard them say that."
On trade, Xi and Trump agreed to a "100-day plan" that Ross said would include "way stations of accomplishment." American business executives took that to mean there had been no deep negotiations on whether China would further open its markets to U.S. companies.
Business leaders had expected the Chinese to announce investments in the United States that would create jobs, as a way to offset some of Trump's complaints about the countries' trade imbalance. But Xi made no such offers, at least publicly.
According to an account in Xinhua, the Chinese invited the United States to participate in a program it calls One Belt One Road, an effort to build infrastructure projects across Asia to Europe, for which China hopes it can attract some American investment.
"The Chinese did not want to create the impression that Xi went to the U.S. to make concessions to Trump; that would come across as weakness," said Yun Sun, a senior associate in the East Asia Program at the Stimson Center in Washington.
In the preparations for the talks, Chinese officials emphasized that they expected few concrete results because they viewed the Florida encounter as a getting-to-know-you session between two big personalities.
Still, Ford Chief Executive Officer Mark Field said the meeting was encouraging and sets the stage for the world's two largest economies to strengthen ties.
"When you have two leaders meet face to face, they become people to each other," Fields said Saturday in an interview with Bloomberg Television in Shanghai. "That's a very firm foundation to then go off and make concrete advances to strengthen the ties between the two countries. I feel that's very possible."
Worsening relations between the U.S. and China would be detrimental for companies like Ford, which is looking to sell more pickups in the world's largest auto market and which recently announced that it will build its luxury Lincoln vehicles in the Asian nation to tap growing demand.
Stop in Alaska
Late Friday, Xi spent time with Gov. Bill Walker of Alaska as the Chinese delegation's plane made a refueling stop in Anchorage, the state's largest city, on its way out of the United States.
Xi's wife and the Chinese delegation stepped off the Boeing 747 and were greeted by Walker, his wife and several dignitaries.
Later, the two men spoke briefly to reporters before a business meeting, in which Walker touted the state's abundant natural resources: oil, fish, air cargo, mineral resources industries.
Walker also advocated for a natural gas pipeline that he has long backed, which would take natural gas from Alaska's North Slope to the coast for shipment.
Alaska could provide a generation's worth of liquefied natural gas to China, he told Xi.
Xi didn't comment on the trade discussion but said he enjoyed his short sightseeing tour of Anchorage, including a stop at Beluga Point, a pullout on the scenic Seward Highway about 15 miles south of Anchorage.
This wasn't his first trip to Alaska, he said, but it was his first opportunity to see a little bit of the state's natural beauty up close.
Xi is the second major world leader to spend time in Alaska's largest city in the past few years. Former U.S. President Barack Obama used a three-day trip to Anchorage in 2015 to showcase the impact of climate change. King Harald V of Norway also made an official visit to Anchorage a few months before Obama.
Information for this article was contributed by Jane Perlez and Yufan Huang of The New York Times; by Toluse Olorunnipa, Jennifer Jacobs, Ting Shi, Nick Wadhams, Margaret Talev, Peter Martin and staff members of Bloomberg News; and by Mark Thiessen, Becky Bohrer and staff members of The Associated Press.
A Section on 04/09/2017