Tesla CEO Elon Musk met with Chinese President Xi Jinping in San Francisco and thanked him for the development of the electric vehicle industry in that country, the company wrote on social media.
According to Tesla’s account on Weibo, a Chinese micro-blogging website, Musk was invited to attend a banquet to welcome Xi in San Francisco.
“President Xi met with Musk and other important representatives at a small-scale reception before the meeting to express his support for Tesla’s development in China,” Tesla wrote on Weibo.
“Musk expressed his gratitude and appreciated the rapid development of China’s new energy vehicle industry,” Tesla said. “This year marks the tenth year of Tesla’s entry into the Chinese market, and Tesla’s Shanghai Super Factory, which was completed and put into operation in 2019, has become Tesla’s important global production base and export center.”
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“We are honored to participate in the rapid development of China’s new energy vehicle industry, and sincerely thank our friends for their care, encouragement and support,” the automaker added. “We will continue to work in China and look forward to developing with the industry in more fields such as new energy vehicles, energy storage and artificial intelligence.”
Earlier this year, Musk made a three-day trip to China during the end of May and early June. He visited Tesla’s Shanghai Gigafactory, which opened in 2019 after the Chinese government eased ownership restrictions to increase competition and accelerate industry development. The Shanghai factory is Tesla’s largest car manufacturing plant outside the United States.
On the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit held in San Francisco, President Biden and Xi met for four hours in Woodside, California, on Wednesday. According to the White House, Biden, among other topics, “raised continued concerns about the PRC’s unfair trade policies, non-market economic practices, and punitive actions against U.S. firms, which harm American workers and families. The President emphasized that the United States will continue to take necessary actions to prevent advanced U.S. technologies from being used to undermine our own national security, without unduly limiting trade and investment.”
Though the meeting was seen as righting U.S.-Chinese relations from their rocky course over the past several months, Biden still called Xi a “dictator” during a press conference following their meeting.
The Chinese government had previously voiced outrage that Biden called Xi a “dictator” earlier this year after American forces shot down a Chinese spy balloon that traversed the continental United States.
“Well, look, he is. He’s a dictator in the sense that he’s a guy who runs a country that is a communist country, that is based on a form of government that is totally different than ours,” Biden said Wednesday.
But Biden stressed Wednesday that “as always, there is no substitute for face-to-face discussions.”
“I’ve always found our discussions straightforward and frank, and I’ve always appreciated it,” Biden said. “Mr. President, we’ve known each other for a long time.”
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He said the two “haven’t always agreed, which was not a surprise to anyone.” “But our meetings have always been candid, straightforward and useful,” Biden said. “I value our conversation because I think it is paramount that you and I understand each other clearly — leader to leader with no misconceptions or miscommunications.”
Fox News’ Brooke Singman contributed to this report.