President Xi Jinping (R) meets with US President Donald Trump in Osaka, Japan on June 29, 2019. (Photo by Feng Yongbin/chinadaily.com.cn)
The agreement reached by the leaders of China and the United States during the G20 summit will not only contribute to the economic development of both countries, but also have positive effects on the world economy and multilateralism, said foreign officials.
President Xi Jinping met with his US counterpart Donald Trump on Saturday during the G20 summit in Japan. Both agreed that the two countries will restart trade talks based on mutual respect and equal footing.
Burhan Kayaturk, deputy chairman of Foreign Affairs Department of the Justice and Development Party of Turkey, said any conflict between China and the US will affect the whole world, and the two leaders have taken on important responsibility for peaceful coexistence.
Mpho Balopi, secretary-general of the Botswana Democratic Party, said his country is very happy to see the goodwill and sincerity between Beijing and Washington. He quoted a local proverb "when two elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers most", and said if the two "elephants" can maintain a harmonious relationship, they are creating a better environment for the world.
Claudio Puty, an associate professor at the Federal University of Para in Brazil, said a trade friction leads to no winner but to negative impact on the global economy.
An expert on economics, Puty also said the current confrontation has already affected the global economic growth as the International Monetary Fund cut the projected growth rate of 2019 to 3.3 percent in April.
The rate was down from the 3.5 percent the IMF had forecast in January, which would be the weakest since 2009. IMF said the growth could slow further due to trade tensions.
Boris Shmelev, director of the Department for Political Studies at the Institute of Economics of Russian Academy of Sciences, said the result of the friction has "very negative impact on the world trade".
He called on the international community to safeguard multilateralism to protect their interests, and said the BRICS, an acronym of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, is a part of the global governance as well as the implementation of multilateralism.
"BRICS is not an organization nor a movement, but a kind of form that has united some of the biggest countries in the world ... to step-by-step influence the process of decision-making and global governance with multilateralism."
