US President Barack Obama's first summit with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping yielded "positive and constructive" results with their marathon talks achieving all goals that were set, a top White House official has said.
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.
