U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi spoke by phone on November 11, 2026, discussing a potential trilateral summit involving Russia, the U.S. State Department disclosed on November 12, according to Reuters. The State Department said in a post on X that the two top diplomats reviewed President Donald Trump’s upcoming APEC visit to China and Chinese President Xi Jinping’s trip to Florida for next month’s G20 summit.
The State Department said the two officials agreed on the importance of meaningful leader-level conversations to advance goals such as peace and denuclearization, including at any potential trilateral leaders meeting with Russia. Rubio told reporters Tuesday that officials were working to arrange a three-way meeting on the APEC sidelines.
China’s official summary omitted any reference to denuclearization or a trilateral summit with Moscow. According to Xinhua, Wang described his conversation with Rubio as positive and constructive and noted that current stability in China-U.S. ties did not come easily and called that stability a rational choice made by two major countries based on respective and shared interests.
Trump said Sunday he expected to meet Xi and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Shenzhen to discuss ending the Iran war and advancing denuclearization. In October, Trump voiced openness to three-way nuclear arms control talks. China’s Foreign Ministry stated last month that its nuclear arsenal is nowhere near the scale of American or Russian stockpiles and argued it would be neither fair nor realistic to expect China to enter trilateral nuclear disarmament talks now. The Wall Street Journal reported Putin has pitched a trilateral meeting to discuss ending the war in Ukraine.
