US President Donald Trump hailed a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) as “amazing” and a “12” on a 10-point scale, but the agreement the two leaders reached appears to be no more than a fragile truce in a trade war with root causes still unresolved.The framework announced yesterday — that includes China resuming soybean purchases, suspending its rare earths export curbs for a year, and the US lowering tariffs on China by 10 percent — broadly rewinds ties to the status that existed before Trump’s “Liberation Day” offensive triggered mutual escalation.
The deal exposes the fundamental mismatch between what Washington wants and what Beijing is willing to offer. Absent from the talks were the big issues cited by Trump as he launched his tariffs in April — China’s industrial policies, manufacturing overcapacity and its export-led growth model.
“So what are we talking about? We are talking about de-escalation of the measures that both sides have taken since the start of the Trump administration in this kind of escalating trade war,” said Emily Kilcrease, director at the Center for a New American Security.
Photo: Reuters
The outcome underscores the robustness of Xi’s new approach to dealing with the US, which relies on a broad toolbox of measures like export controls, swiftly deployed in response to each move by the Trump administration.
An official briefed on the deliberations said the Chinese had a realistic set of expectations for this encounter — and those did not include a fundamental reset of two-way ties. Chinese officials were happy with Trump’s tone entering and his framing of the meeting as a “G2,” said the official, who declined to be named or further identified because he was not authorized to speak to the media.
China sees this as a stepping stone to a bigger meeting where they can stabilize the relationship, the official added.
Given the long-simmering tensions, the very fact that both leaders had a warm meeting — and agreed to two follow-up visits next year — offers rattled multinational corporations caught in the middle a much needed reprieve, analysts said.
Trump said tariffs on Chinese imports would be cut to 47 percent from about 57 percent by halving the rate of levies related to trade in fentanyl precursor chemicals to 10 percent from 20 percent.
The deal buys both sides maneuvering room: Trump gets a win before his planned visit to Beijing next year, Xi gets relief from elevated US tariffs that have put pressure on Chinese manufacturers.
Even this tactical victory is incomplete. China’s latest rare earths licensing curbs are delayed, not dismantled, but earlier restrictions on the critical minerals that have upended global trade remain, leaving US factories facing uncertainty in sourcing critical materials.
“I think that what we’ve seen this year has been a more or less total vindication of China’s strategy of never striking first, but always striking back,” said Joe Mazur, geopolitics analyst at Trivium China, a consultancy.
“It’s very clear that rare earths is the primary piece of leverage, the ace in the hole that China is able to wield over the US — it doesn’t look like the US has any comparable leverage or any way of breaking the stranglehold for the time being,” he said
The agreement highlights how dramatically the relationship between the world’s two biggest economies has deteriorated since Trump’s first term, when negotiators produced a comprehensive 96-page document covering intellectual property, banking and agriculture.
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