'Trump accepts Xi's invitation to China'

US President Donald Trump has accepted his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping's invitation to pay a state visit to China this year, state media reported on Friday.

Xi, who is currently in the US to hold talks with Trump for the first time in Florida resort of Mar-a-Lago, yesterday extended the invitation to Trump for a state visit to China in 2017.

Trump accepted the invitation with pleasure, and hoped to make the trip at an early date, Xinhua reported.

Xi and his wife, Peng Liyuan, joined Trump and his wife, Melania, at a long table in an ornate candle-lit private dining room festooned with red and yellow floral centerpieces, where they dined on pan-seared Dover sole and New York strip steak. The fanfare over the summit was overshadowed by another pressing foreign policy issue: the US response to a deadly poison gas attack in Syria.

As Trump and Xi were wrapping up dinner, US forces fired dozens of cruise missiles at a Syrian airbase from which it said the chemical weapons attack was launched this week, an escalation of the US military role in Syria that swiftly drew sharp criticism from Russia. He brought his top economic and national advisers to Florida for the meeting, including Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross. Trump's predecessors Barack Obama and George W Bush have visited China for a number of summits and bilateral talks. Obama's first visit to China came in 2009 when he met with then Chinese president Hu Jintao and premier Wen Jiabao.

In 2014, he visited the Communist giant for the APEC summit and met with Xi and Premier Li Keqiang. The summit brought together two leaders who could not seem more different.