Exemplary climate goals

THE TALKS BETWEEN PRESIDENT XI JINPING and visiting US President Barack Obama in the past two days have turned out to be productive. Impressive consensuses have been reached on such topics as trade and investment, anti-terror collaboration, dispute resolution and crisis control, to name but a few.

Even by agreeing to disagree, their face-to-face communication is conducive to benign interaction between the world's two largest economies. At least it helps to reduce the tensions that have resulted from misjudgments about each other's strategic intentions. China and the US have too many mutual misunderstandings for them to be straightened out in just a couple of days.

But the real highlight of this Xi-Obama meeting was the "China-US Joint Announcement on Climate Change". This unexpected outcome on global warming is a pleasant surprise.