United States President Donald Trump has said that his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping has assured him that Beijing will not attempt to unify Taiwan with mainland China while the Republican leader is in office.

Trump said on Sunday that the long-contentious issue of Taiwan “never even came up as a subject” when he met with Xi in South Korea on Thursday for their first face-to-face meeting in six years. The meeting largely focused on US-China trade tensions.

Asked on US media outlet CBS’s “60 Minutes” programme whether he would order US forces into action if China moved militarily on Taiwan, Trump demurred.

The US, under both Republican and Democratic administrations, has maintained a policy of “strategic ambiguity” on Taiwan — trying not to tip their hands on whether the US would come

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