WASHINGTON: US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Sunday signalled that Washington and Beijing have reached a tentative agreement to de-escalate their damaging tariff-driven trade war, just days before a planned summit between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping.
In an interview with ABC’s “This Week,” Bessent said the US threat of a 100 percent tariff hike on Chinese goods had effectively been taken off the table in exchange for Beijing deferring curbs on its global rare earth exports.
“The tariffs will be averted,” Bessent said after wrapping up talks with Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng in the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur.
On the export controls, China will “delay that for a year while they re-examine it,” Bessent said.
The secretary’s remarks came as Trump kicked off an Asia tour in Kuala Lumpur that will culminate in a summit with Xi in South Korea.
Bessent said he expected the two leaders to formally announce the deal at their summit.
The secretary said Beijing had also agreed on “substantial” purchases from US farmers, who are a key source of domestic political support for Trump and have been massively impacted by the tariff row between the two countries.
China, once the biggest buyer of US soybean exports, simply halted all orders as the trade dispute took hold.
“I believe, when the announcement of the deal with China is made public, that our soybean farmers will feel very good,” Bessent said.
US-China trade talks
Earlier today, Xinhua news agency reported that China, US delegations reached basic consensuses on arrangements to address respective trade concerns after two days of talks.
The essence of China-US economic and trade relations is mutual benefit and win-win results, and the two countries gain from cooperation and lose from confrontation, Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng said after meeting in Kuala Lumpur from Saturday to Sunday with US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer.
Guided by the important consensuses reached by the two heads of state in their phone conversations since the beginning of this year, the two sides had candid, in-depth and constructive exchanges of views on important trade and economic issues of mutual concerns, Xinhua stated.
The two sides agreed to work out specific details and follow the domestic approval processes of each side.
He Lifeng noted that maintaining the stable development of China-US trade relations serves the shared interests of both countries and peoples, and meets the expectations of the international community.
The US Treasury Secretary said the two sides had also thrashed out a “final deal” over the US version of the widely popular Chinese social media app TikTok, which boasts around 170 million US users.
Citing national security concerns, Washington has sought to wrest TikTok’s US operations from the hands of Chinese parent company ByteDance.
Last month, Trump signed an executive order that would place control in the hands of a group of US investors — many of them close allies of the president.
“All the details are ironed out, and that will be for the two leaders to consummate that transaction on Thursday in Korea,” Bessent told CBS’s “Face the Nation” in a separate interview.
